Fred McLafferty
Fred Warren McLafferty ( born March 11, 1923 in Evanston ( Illinois)) is an American chemist.
Lafferty graduated from the University of Nebraska with a bachelor 's degree in 1943, served as an infantryman in World War II in Europe (where he received high awards, Bronze Star, Purple Heart, etc.), studied after the war at the University of Nebraska with master degree in 1947 and in 1950 received his doctorate from Cornell University with William Miller in Organic Chemistry. As a post - graduate student, he was at the University of Iowa at RL Shriner and went in 1950 to Dow Chemical, where he led the mass spectrometry and gas chromatography. In 1956 he became director of the Eastern Research Lab of Dow in Framingham. In 1964 he became professor of chemistry at Purdue University and 1968 Debye Professor of Chemistry at Cornell University.
He is known for pioneering work in mass spectrometry, which he first docked in the 1950s with Robert Gohlke by gas chromatography. He developed at Dow, the first GC / MS instruments (gas chromatography -mass spectrometry ) and applied them to the structure determination of organic molecules. He discovered named after him McLafferty rearrangement. He also developed in 1998, the method of electron capture dissociation (ECD), the fragmentation into ions in the gas phase. At Cornell University, he developed databases for mass spectrometry data and its analysis, among others, artificial intelligence methods (including the program PBM, Probability Based Matching of Mass Spectra).
He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences (1982 ), the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the Accademia dei XL. In 1996 he received the Chemical Pioneer Award, 1999 Heyrovský Medal, the 1992 Robert Boyle Prize for Analytical Science, 1985, JJ Thomson Medal, 1989 Mass Spectrometry Award, the 1971 Chemical Instrumentation Award from the American Chemical Society, 1999, Giulio Natta Gold Medal, 2001 Torbern Bergman Medal, 1985 Oesper Award, the 1986 SC Lind Award and in 1984, the William H. Nichols Medal. He holds honorary doctorates from the University of Nebraska, Purdue University and the University of Liège and Honorary Member of the Italian Chemical Society.
He has been married since 1948 and has five children.
Writings
- RA Zubarev, NL Kelleher: Electron Capture Dissociation of Multiply Charged Protein Cations - a Nonergodic Process, J. Am. Chem Soc., Volume 120, 1998, pp. 3265-3266