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Reaction mechanisms are at the core of his understanding of organic chemistry. Throughout his career, Expert's approach to chemical problems has been to perform careful experiments to determine the mechanism that is operating. Once that is determined, it becomes much easier to plan methods to improve the performance of the reaction. An example would be his patent on the dynamic resolution of a ketone. He used the enolization of an amino ketone to racemize it while preparing an acidic diastereomeric salt. The salt was at a pH of about 4 and caused the ketone to enolize. One of the optical isomers precipitated, while the material in solution kept reequilibrating. Ultimately 90% of the material precipitated as the wanted material. This is a good example of using mechanistic knowledge to produce the desired outcome.

His group of 3 people were challenged to develop a synthesis of physostigmine from scratch. After reviewing the methods out there he devised what he felt was a superior alternative. The group pursued the best literature method and his method in parallel. After 2 months of work, all work was moved to this innovative method as it had achieved more successes in that time than the literature method. In the two months they had completed 4 steps of the ultimate 9 step procedure. The method had come about due to computer modelling of a suggested starting material. Its indication of a predominant reactive site on a cheap indole derivative allowed a different starting material with a novel approach.

In his 30 years on the bench, he has run across many unique chemical separations. Some have been found by accident while others have been predicted. A particular one that he was pleased with was done by pKa. He had related two organic acids that clearly should have had at least 1-2 pKa units difference in acidity. He estimated the proportions by by NMR. With the mixture dissolved in a non-polar solvent, He added enough triethyl amine to be protonated by the stronger. It dropped out of solution leaving the weaker unprotonated acid in solution. Chemical separations often don't have rules. They must be dealt with on an individual basis taking the particular problem into account.

Much of his time has been spent working on natural products. The company he worked for made all of the opioid pain relievers and he has worked on many of them. He has synthesized and purified the cannabinoids and one of the purifications is in the process of being patented. He has a lot of experience in working with natural products and troubleshooting impurity removal.

He is experienced in structural identification of organic compounds. He has participated in x-ray crystallography identifications and prepared the pure samples of unknowns for identifications. he has experience in stereochemistry and have identified particular stereoisomers in a mixture.

He has worked in the organic laboratory for over 30 years. In that time, he has found that his expertise in organic chemistry allows him to be a first class troubleshooter of existing processes. Using his mechanistic approach, he can approach a problem and often eliminate it adjusting some of the parameters such as solvent and temperature based on the mechanism. He is also capable of molecular modeling and that and that can sometimes suggest the appropriate reaction controls.

He is familiar with a broad range of organic compounds and how to safely deal with them. This comes from over 30 years of working safely in the laboratory.

He learns organic reactions by their mechanisms. Reactions can be grouped by the mechanisms that they react by. This allows him to see the "forest through the trees" and use and change the reactions based on similarities with other reactions. Those similarities can guide him on how to improve the characteristics of the reaction currently being worked on.

It is the nature of organic chemistry to be qualitative. In most of the work he has done, he first confirms that the starting material is what it is supposed to be. He then reacts it, and identifies the products. The process of identifying the various functional groups that are changed or are not changed in a given process is an adventure in qualitative organic chemistry.