The fields of Physical-Inorganic and Bioinorganic Chemistry emphasizing the application of a wide variety of spectroscopic and computational methods to determine the electronic structure of transition metal complexes. Dr. Solomon's esearch is directed toward both high symmetry small molecule complexes to define in detail electronic structure contributions to chemical and physical properties, and metal ion active sites in catalysis to understand their unusual spectral features in terms of electronic and geometric structure and to evaluate these structural contributions to reactivity. The focus of many studies is on fundamental problems in Bioinorganic Chemistry.

Areas of present interest include:

1. Electronic structure contributions to electron transfer in blue copper, CuA and iron sulfur sites;
2. O₂ and N₂O activation by Cu cluster active sites;
3. Structure/function correlations over non-heme iron enzymes;
4. Development of new spectroscopic and electronic structure methods in bioinorganic chemistry.