Electron-capture dissociation Fred Warren McLafferty (May 11, 1923 − December 26, 2021) was an American chemist known for his work in mass spectrometry.
He served in western Europe during the invasion of Germany and was awarded the Combat Infantryman Badge, a Purple Heart, Five Bronze Star Medals and a Presidential Unit Citation.
[10] This allowed him to work out techniques for determining the structure of organic molecules by mass spectrometry, most notably in the discovery of what is now known as the McLafferty rearrangement.
[13] While at Cornell, McLafferty assembled one of the first comprehensive databases of mass spectra[14] and pioneered artificial intelligence techniques to interpret GC/MS results.
[15] His PBM[16] STIRS program has widespread use to save hours of time-consuming work otherwise required to manually analyze GC/MS results.