The Oral History Project of the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Cornell University, led by Charles Wilcox and Kelly Strickland, presents this DVD of an extended interview with a senior member of the faculty in which they share their life?s journey, their professional interests and their reflections about the distinctive character of their department and its nurturing environment. Their comments reveal some of the aspects that make this an exemplary academic unit. Short biographies of interviewee and interviewer are included, in addition to a photo gallery and list of publications of the interviewee.

Fred W. McLafferty has been a mass spectrometry pioneer in such fields as gaseous ion reactions (McLafferty rearrangement), instrumentation (GC/MS, LC/MS, MS/MS), techniques (collisionally activated dissociation, neutralization-reionization, electron capture dissociation, IR photodissociation spectroscopy, top down proteomics), computer data acquisition, reduction, and identification (Probability Based Matching), reference data (600K mass spectra), and high-resolution MS/MS characterization of biomolecules and gaseous protein conformers. He has coauthored/ edited 500 publications. And he is still publishing original research papers. He is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences (1982), American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1985), and the Italian Academy of Sciences XL (2002). He has received American Chemical Society Awards in Chemical Instrumentation (1972), Analytical Chemistry (1981), and Mass Spectrometry (1989).