Rate My Professor William Green

William H. Green is the Hoyt C. Hottel Professor of Chemical Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Director of the MIT Energy Initiative. He earned a B.A. from Swarthmore College in 1983 and a Ph.D. in physical chemistry from the University of California, Berkeley in 1988. Following postdoctoral research at Cambridge University and the University of Pennsylvania, he worked at Exxon Research & Engineering for six years before joining the MIT faculty in 1997. Green’s research focuses on chemical kinetics, reaction engineering, prediction of chemical reactions and properties, and development of related software, including the open-source Reaction Mechanism Generator and machine-learning tools such as Chemprop and ASKCOS. He has co-authored more than 350 journal articles cited over 23,000 times and holds several patents, two of which have been commercialized, including through the company Thiozen that he co-founded.

Green has received numerous honors, including the AIChE R. H. Wilhelm Award in Chemical Reaction Engineering in 2019, election as a Fellow of the Combustion Institute in 2018 and of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2016, and the ACS Richard A. Glenn Award. He previously served as Editor of the International Journal of Chemical Kinetics, Executive Officer of the MIT Department of Chemical Engineering, and faculty chair of MIT’s Mobility of the Future project. In 2024 he was appointed Director of the MIT Energy Initiative. Green has convened international conferences on chemical kinetics and mentored more than 20 former students who now hold tenured or tenure-track faculty positions.