Finding new, plant-based bioactive compounds with antioxidant, anti-inflammatory, and antimicrobial activity is an important part of scientific research and drug discovery programs. Both cinnamon and vanilla are known for their therapeutic properties.  The goal of our research was to obtain the essential oil from cinnamon and vanilla, identify and isolate their major organic compounds, create derivatives of these compounds, and finally test those compounds for their antioxidant and antibacterial qualities.  We used techniques such as hydrodistillation and Soxhlet extraction to obtain our essential oils which we purified using column chromatography and then reacted using oxidation, reduction, and Schiff-base forming reactions.  Our initial results indicate that some of the compounds showed observable activity in both antioxidant assays and antibacterial assays.  In particular, our data indicates that the phenol moiety plays a key role in reducing radicals in the antioxidant assays.  Further experiments involving additional Schiff-base derivatives as well as their coordination complexes could prove interesting.