Research in the Ball Group focuses on innovative use of NMR spectroscopy to explore interesting and important chemical problems, often in the areas of inorganic and organometallic chemistry. A major feature of our research is our use of in situ photochemistry coupled with NMR spectroscopy to generate and characterize reactive intermediates. NMR spectroscopy is arguably the most powerful tool available to the chemist for determining molecular structure and motion within molecules, so there is much to be learned about reactive molecules if NMR spectroscopy can be successfully applied to their study.

Our research is increasingly making use of computational chemistry in various forms - DFT, ab initio and molecular mechanics methods. The computational methods significantly enhance our understanding of our experimental results and can also be used to suggest new experimental directions.