While Diaconescu is best known for her work on the reactivity of early transition metals, lanthanides, and actinides, she has also contributed to the field of redox active ligand systems for small molecule activation. Her group has exploited ferrocenes electronic and redox properties to enable catalytic transformations with electrophilic transition metal centers. Diaconescus research on redox active systems is studying how ferrocene's electronic and redox properties when strategically incorporated into a ligand affect the reactivity of d-block metal complexes. This extends to redox switchable catalysis and small molecule activation with applications in polyaniline nanofiber supporting metal catalysis and bioorganometallic polymers. 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. The ring-opening polymerization of cyclic ethers and esters as well as the polymerization of alkenes has been exploited with catalysts containing ferrocene.