Michael Abraham (chemist)

Michael H Abraham (11 December 1931, London – 19 January 2021) was an English chemist. He mainly worked in the area of physical organic chemistry, with his research interests being hydrogen bonding, solvation, linear free energy relationships (LFER), quantitative structure-activity relationships (QSAR) and solute-solvent interactions. A faculty member of University College London since 1988, Abraham was known within his field for creating the Abraham General Solvation Model.

Biography
Abraham was born 11 December 1931 in London to Judah and Elizabeth Abraham. He was one of four boys. He attended Magnus Grammar School in Newark-on-Trent before graduating with first class honours from Northern Polytechnic London, where he studied chemistry, in 1951. He then earned his PhD from University College London (UCL) under Alwyn Davies, and later his DSc in 1974. He became a reader at Battersea Polytechnic until 1988, when he returned to UCL.

Between 1957 and 1969, Abraham largely focused on the chemistry of organometallic compounds. Key works done by Abraham and his UCL colleagues include the measuring and calculation of molecular properties of thousands of molecules. These properties include H-bond acidity and basicity, dipolarity and polarisability. He received two Ebert awards from the American Pharmaceutical Association: one in 1992 for his paper Role of hydrogen bonding in general anaesthesia, and again in 2002 for his paper on the "valuation of human intestinal absorption data and subsequent derivation". His work led him to appear on Thomson Reuters' list of Highly Cited Researchers.

Personal life
Michael Abraham and his wife Elisabeth Mayer (died 1999) had two sons, Benjamin and Jonathan. Elisabeth had also been a PhD student at UCL. Abraham was a hobby landscape painter and held several exhibitions throughout London. Additionally, he enjoyed classical, particularly chamber, music.

Abraham died on 19 January 2021, aged 89.