Paula Diaconescu

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Paola L. Diaconescu is a Romanian‑American chemistry professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. She studies redox‑active metal complexes, lanthanide chemistry, and how metals help activate small molecules and drive polymerization. She earned a B.S. from the University of Bucharest in 1998, researching transition metals and f‑block elements. She earned a Ph.D. from MIT in 2003 under Christopher C. Cummins, focusing on uranium chemistry. After a postdoctoral stint at Caltech with Robert Grubbs, she joined UCLA in 2005. Her work uses ferrocene in ligands to tune the reactivity of metal catalysts, enabling redox‑switchable catalysis and new ways to activate small molecules. This approach has led to catalysts for ring‑opening polymerization and alkene polymerization, often using ferrocene‑based systems. Diaconescu has received several awards, including a Sloan Fellowship (2009), the Humboldt Foundation’s Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Award (2014), a Guggenheim Fellowship (2015), and she was named a fellow of the AAAS in 2019.