Kemball sailed on the same ship back to England in September 1947, and joined the Department of Colloid Science at Cambridge to take up his Research Fellowship at Trinity. In the summer of 1949 Kemball moved to the Department of Physical Chemistry. Having reassembled his newly introduced mass spectrometer system, he started on an extensive period of research on the exchange reactions of hydrocarbons with deuterium by using evaporated metal films as catalysts; this was a significant a development of his work with Taylor at Princeton.
