R. Graham Cooks

Meet R. Graham Cooks

Most Memorable advice? “If you worry about tenure then you don’t deserve it,” said to me by H. C. Brown in 1969 when he was visiting Kansas State University where I was an Asst. Prof. of organic chemistry. I was so successful at not worrying that the next year I took a non-tenure track position at another university – by chance, Purdue University.

An exciting frontier in human health? A drug-discovery platform, based on DESI-MS, that is automated and works on the nmole to pmole scale to perform reaction screening, small-scale synthesis and then bioassays. With data acquisition at rates of one reaction/second, the system seems poised to accelerate the first steps of drug discovery. We are using it to discover inhibitors to the enzyme SULT2b1b, a target in prostate cancer.

Missing from the analytical toolbox? The same item that has been missing for two decades: a powerful portable commercial mass spectrometer for point-of-care measurements. It must privilege speed over other parameters and must have MS/MS for chemical specificity.