in 1978, he became director of a national science foundation center for mass spectrometry at nebraska. under the aegis of the nsf, he commissioned the first commercial triple sector tandem mass spectrometer. with this instrumentation, his coworkers and he sequenced the first unknown peptide using soft ionization and tandem mass spectrometry (ms/ms). they also discovered a new class of fragmentation of gas-phase ions later termed "charge-remote fragmentation." and applied it to a wide variety of compounds including fatty acids, lipids, surfactants, steroids, and peptides. an expanded four-sector version was employed to insert noble gas atoms in c-60 and other fullerenes and a second noble gas atom in synthetic fullerenes already containing a noble gas atom.