Ronnie Bell

Who was Ronnie Bell?

Ronald Percy "Ronnie" Bell FRS was a British chemist who worked in the Physical Chemistry Laboratory at the University of Oxford, England.

Bell worked in the laboratory of the Danish physical chemist Johannes Nicolaus Brønsted from 1928 to 1932. Later, he was particularly active in Oxford with his research group between 1945 and 1967. He was a Fellow of Balliol College, Oxford from 1933 to 1967, when he was appointed an honorary fellow on his move to become Professor of Chemistry at the newly founded University of Stirling in Scotland. Bell could be called by the hybrid term, a "physical organic chemist", since he investigated the use of physicochemical methods to discover the mechanisms of organic reactions. He was a colleague of Edmund Bowen.

He is the author of The Proton in Chemistry dealing with acid-base reactions. The second edition has been reviewed as giving a comprehensive coverage of proton transfer-equilibrium, kinetics, catalysis, structural and solvent effects, and reaction mechanism, all within 300 pages.