Our research interests include organometallic mechanisms on surfaces probed by methods including solution organometallic chemistry, surface organometallic chemistry, surface chemistry, and electrochemistry. The objective of our research program is to improve the fundamental understanding of catalysis in order to develop new and better processes. This work is more basic than most industries can afford to do in-house, but can lead to significant improvements of large-scale catalytic processes in use today. Our approach is synthetic and mechanistic, and we will use organometallic and organic synthetic methods. Many of the compounds we use will be air-sensitive, requiring careful synthetic techniques. We use NMR, IR, elemental analysis, and x-ray diffraction as primary characterization techniques.