Bridging Basic Chemistry and Cheminformatics: Jupyter-based Modules on Molecular Representation for Introductory Chemistry
Author: Prof. Kevin P. Greenman, Ph.D. (Catholic Institute of Technology, MolSSI ACT-CMS Faculty Fellow 2024-2026)
Note: These materials are under development and will be first piloted in a course in Fall 2025.
- Predict the molecular geometry of simple molecules using VSEPR theory.
- Describe hybridization and determine sp, sp², sp³, sp³d, and sp³d² states.
- Identify and differentiate between ionic and covalent bonds based on electronegativity differences and electron transfer/sharing mechanisms.
- Translate between chemical representations (formula, SMILES, graph, geometry, conformers).
- Choose the appropriate representation for a given task and justify the choice.
- Read and write chemical data as SMILES + property values from CSV using pandas.
- Clean and visualize chemical datasets using pandas, RDKit, and other Python operations.
- Use Colab GPU resources to train a basic Chemprop (graph neural-network) model.
- Visualize ML regression results with matplotlib.
This work was supported by the MolSSI ACT-CMS Faculty Fellowship program, funded by the Office of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure (OAC) NSF Award OAC 2321044.