Robert Graham Cooks is the Henry Bohn Hass Distinguished Professor of Chemistry in the Aston Laboratories for Mass Spectrometry at Purdue University.
[4] Cooks became an Assistant Professor at Kansas State University from 1968 to 1971.
[5][6] Research in Cooks' laboratory (the Aston Laboratories) has contributed to a diverse assortment of areas within mass spectrometry, ranging from fundamental research to instrument and method development to applications.
Cooks' research interests over the course of his career have included the study of gas-phase ion chemistry,[7] tandem mass spectrometry,[8] angle-resolved mass spectrometry[9] and energy-resolved mass spectrometry (ERMS);[10] dissociation processes, including collision-induced dissociation (CID),[11] surface-induced dissociation (SID),[12] and photodissociation (PD);[13] and desorption processes, including secondary ion mass spectrometry (SIMS),[14] laser desorption ionization (LD)[15] and desorption electrospray ionization (DESI).
[16] His research has ranged through areas from preparative mass spectrometry, ionization techniques and quadrupole ion traps (QITs) and related technologies[17] to as far afield as abiogenisis (also known as "the origin of life") via homochirality.