Trandon was born in Utah and grew up in the Wasatch Valley. He then attended Weber State University in Ogden, UT as a first-generation college student. Upon graduating, he moved across the country to pursue graduate studies under the tutelage of Professor Michel R. Gagné at the University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill. While there, he investigated the selective modification of carbohydrates and natural products through a reductive hydrosilylative mechanism to prepare value added products. Expanding on the goal of performing selective catalysis, he moved back across the country to the University of California – Berkeley as a NIH post-doctoral scholar in a collaborative project between Professors F. Dean Toste, Kenneth N. Raymond, and Robert G. Bergman. During this time his work focused on utilizing supramolecular hosts to modulate catalyst reactivity and selectivity to achieve enzyme-like selectivity for site-selective hydrogenation reactions. Trandon and his family will traverse the country once more to join the faculty of Old Dominion University in December 2020.