Professor Allinger received his B.S. from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1951 and his Ph.D. from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1954. He was on the faculty at Wayne State University before coming to the University of Georgia as Research Professor in 1969. He is known for his pioneering efforts in the use of computational chemistry, especially molecular mechanics, to solve a variety of chemical problems. He is the author of the MM2, MM3 and MM4 molecular mechanics software packages.

Why spend six months or a year doing complicated and difficult experiments if the question being asked can be answered by theoretical and/or computational methods in an afternoon? Of course, not all questions can be answered by computations, and require experiments, but many now can be. Structures of molecules, including all of the bond angles and lengths, and the relative energies of the conformations, can usually be calculated. Much of our effort has been devoted to solving the problem of determining accurate three-dimensional structures, and the resulting energies using both quantum mechanical and molecular mechanical methods. We now have sophisticated programs for carrying out the calculations and can examine the results using pictures on graphics screens. This makes the study of three-dimensional chemistry a lot easier than it used to be. We have applied such studies to both small and large molecules, up to proteins.

H.D. Thomas, K. Chen and N.L. Allinger, "Toward a Better Understanding of Covalent Bonds", J. Am. Chem. Soc. 1994, 116, 5887

J.-H. Lii, K.-H. Chen and N. L. Allinger, "Alcohols, Ethers, Carbohydrates and Related Compounds. Part V. The Bohlmann Effect", J. Phys. Chem., in press.