Her research focuses on prebiotic chemistry, the origin of biological homochirality, and kinetics and mechanisms of asymmetric catalytic reactions.
Her main responsibility at the company was to set up a laboratory for research and development in the kinetics and catalysis of organic reactions.
She was a research group leader at the Max-Planck-Institut für Kohlenforschung in Mülheim an-der-Ruhr, Germany, professor and chair of physical chemistry at the University of Hull in Kingston-upon-Hull, UK, and professor of chemistry and chemical engineering and chair in Catalysis at Imperial College London, UK.
Her most current research applies the quantitative aspects of her chemical engineering background to the synthesis of complex organic molecules by catalytic routes, particularly asymmetric catalysis.
[1] Blackmond has pioneered the methodology of Reaction Progress Kinetic Analysis (RPKA), which is used for rapid determination of concentration dependences of reactants.
She has shown solutions of mostly enantiopure amino acids can be produced from nearly racemic mixtures via solution-solid partitioning of the enantiomers.