Robert Graham Cooks

Henry B. Hass Distinguished Professor of Chemistry. Analytical chemist whose research ranges from fundamental chemistry to instrumentation development in mass spectrometry. Used tandem mass spectrometers (MS/MS) to analyze complex mixtures, including biological compounds, a technique that impacted environmental and pharmaceutical analysis and enabled the field of proteomics. Instrumentation developed from his research has applications in materials and life sciences, pharmaceutics, forensics, environment, health care, and security. Introduced desorption electrospray ionization (DESI), a method with applications in biological tissue imaging, tumor margin characterization, and disease diagnosis. His current focus is on accelerated chemical reactions in small droplets and use of this phenomenon with DESI to perform high throughput chemical and biochemical reaction screening.