Dr. Micheal Huggins: H-bonding and supramolecular chemistry

I attended Dr.  Huggins` talk about his work with supramolecular chemistry, which he explained is the chemistry of how molecules interact through intermolecular forces (his work focuses on H-bonding) without the formation of true bonds. He talked about a project involving a molecule that forms a dimer: the molecule has an amine and a ketone group at locations on the molecule such that the amine of one is attracted through H-bonding to the ketone of a second molecule, and the ketone of the first aligns with the amine of the second. The goal of him and his research group was to add a group to the molecule that would prevent dimerization. In their first attempts, such as the addition of an amide group, but the molecules was either lost in the process, or dimerization was not prevented. He also talked about his methods for detemining the structures of these compounds and how they dimerize, such as NMR and the use of a technique that told which atoms were near an atom in space.