Bousfield obtained both his undergraduate degree (1963) and his doctorate (1966) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
His doctoral thesis, entitled "Higher Order Suspension Maps for Non-Additive Functors", was written under the supervision of Daniel Kan.[2] He was a lecturer and assistant professor at Brandeis University and moved to the University of Illinois at Chicago where he worked from 1972 to his retirement in 2000.
Bousfield married Marie Vastersavendts, a Belgian mathematician, in 1968.
The Bousfield-Kan spectral sequence, Bousfield localization of spectra and model categories, and the Bousfield-Friedlander model structure[4] are named after Bousfield (and Kan and Friedlander, respectively).
He was named to the 2018 class of fellows of the American Mathematical Society "for contributions to homotopy theory and for exposition".