 He was co-spokesperson of the AGS E859 experiment, which investigated strangeness production in heavy ion collisions, and later spokesperson of the PHENIX experiment at RHIC from 1997 to 2006.PHENIX is a multinational collaboration with over 500 scientists from more than a dozen countries and is one of the two large experiments at RHIC.PHENIX, along with three other RHIC experiments, determined that the relativistic heavy ion collisions at RHIC were successful in creating the quark–gluon plasma (QGP), a state of matter believed to have existed approximately 10 microseconds after the Big Bang.