Rodriguez-Macia's Research Group has interests in the Bioinorganic Chemistry area to learn from and mimic nature at the intersection of chemistry, biology and physical chemistry. The goal is to acquire insight from the natural enzymes into the requirements for developing novel green catalytic processes, new synthetic materials and more efficient catalysts.

By investigating energy-converting enzymes we aim to fully understand how, by using earth-abundant metals in their active site, they are able to perform key chemical reactions in a very efficient way. These reactions usually represent enormous challenges for chemists to carry out on a laboratory scale (e.g. reduction of nitrogen to ammonia, oxidation and production of hydrogen and reduction of CO2 to CO and formate).

The group focuses on two particular classes of metalloenzymes, hydrogenases and CO dehydrogenases and employs complementary spectroscopic techniques alongside electrochemistry to study the catalytic mechanism and the active site-protein matrix interplay in these fascinating enzymes. Rodriguez-Macia's group is passionate about exploring new protein scaffolds and active-site mimics to discover novel reactivities, as well as developing new techniques to be able to study all the intermediate states in the fast catalytic performance of these enzymes.