Paula L. Diaconescu is a Romanian-American chemistry professor at the University of California, Los Angeles.

[3] Before joining the faculty at UCLA in 2005, she spent two years as a postdoctoral fellow at the California Institute of Technology with Robert Grubbs.

Her group has exploited ferrocene's electronic and redox properties to enable catalytic transformations with electrophilic transition metal centers.

[7][8] She recognized that redox-switchable catalysis can generate multiple catalytically active species with varying reactivity.

The idea is that a compound can have orthogonal reactivity between the oxidized and reduced forms of the catalyst.