[2] He has received a number of awards, including the Biemann Medal in 2006 "for his pioneering contributions to the integration of ion mobility separations with a variety of mass spectrometry technologies.

He worked with Kenji Honma on electron transfer mechanisms[6] and reactions of excited-state metal atoms and gaseous molecules.

[1] Among those who have influenced him, he includes Michael T. Bowers, Jesse L. Beauchamp, R. Graham Cooks, Scott A. McLuckey, Fred McLafferty, Evan R. Williams, Joseph A. Loo, Vicki Wysocki, and Julie A.

[2] His graduate students have included Renã A. S. Robinson, Stephen Valentine, Cherokee Hoaglund-Hyzer,[10] and Catherine Srebalus Barnes.

[2] Clemmer has helped to establish ion mobility as both a powerful tool and a field of research through his "thorough studies" and "revolutionary instrumental methods".

[3] In early work, Clemmer and Jarrold used long drift tubes with nonclustering gas atmospheres to increase the resolving power of ion-mobility spectrometry.

[13][14][15] Clemmer and his colleagues have developed at least a dozen different configurations combining modular components for ion-mobility with mass spectrometry instruments.

[25] Ion mobility-mass spectrometry techniques also allow the measurement and correlation of a wide variety of different characteristics simultaneously in a single analysis.

Researchers can use these techniques to examine complex biological samples for lipidomics, proteomics, glycomics, and metabolomics information.