I. amhb : (anti)aromaticity-modulated hydrogen bonding. ii. evaluation of implicit solvation models for predicting hydrogen bond free energies

My doctoral research under Professor James E. Jackson focused on hydrogen bonding (H-bonding) using physical organic chemistry tools. In the first chapter, I present how I used quantum chemical simulations, synthetic organic chemistry, NMR spectroscopy, and X-ray crystallography to provide robust theoretical and experimental evidence for an interplay between (anti)aromaticity and H-bond strength of heterocycles, a concept that we dubbed (Anti)aromaticity-Modulated Hydrogen Bonding (AMHB). In the second chapter, I used accurately measured hydrogen bond energies for a range of substrates and solvents to evaluate the performance of implicit solvation models in combination with density functional methods for predicting solution phase hydrogen bond energies. This benchmark study provides useful guidelines for a priori modeling of hydrogen bonding-based designs.Coordinates of the optimized geometries and crystal structures are provided as supplementary materials.