Research

Daisy's PhD research in the Cook Research Group, at Indiana University, investigates organometallic methodology with abundant earth and precious metals. The Cook lab is inspired to find solutions to the complex challenges in synthesis. The group utilizes various metals to discover new complementary reactivity of well-explored systems and under-explored systems. 

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The Heck reaction remains a useful reaction for synthetic chemists---carbon-carbon bond formation. The Cook Lab began the exploration of a variant of the Heck reaction, the reductive-Heck reaction, en route to englarin A. The Heck literature has bountiful examples of intramolecular reductive-Heck reactions, intermolecular remain scarce. Daisy developed a intermolecular reductive-Heck reaction with palladium nanoparticles in a pool of literature that summarize several intramolecular examples.