Professor Michael Abraham died January 19th 2021 aged 89.

Michael was born December 11th 1931 in London, the first son of Judah and Elizabeth Abraham. His father Judah came from Shanghai to study for a degree in Engineering in London where he met his future wife Elizabeth who had left her hometown Newark for a job in London. It was a hard life in the depression and the family’s fortunes were not helped by the arrival of three more children, all boys. However they survived and moved from London at the start of the war to Newark where Judah found work at the Ransome and Marles engineering factory.

Michael was educated at the Magnus Gammar School, Newark and then University College London where he graduated with first class honours in Chemistry in 1951 and later a Ph.D. under Alwyn Davies. He then obtained a position at Battersea Polytechnic which then became the University of Surrey. He finally moved back to University College London where he held a Professorship and Emeritus Professorship. His wife Elizabeth was also a Ph.D. student at UC.

He was a prominent researcher and also a distinguished artist. He gave several exhibitions of his paintings in London. His research interests diversified to include hydrogen bonding, solvation, linear free energy relationships and quantitative structure activity relationships (QSAR).

He twice received the Ebert prise of the American Pharmaceutical Association. In 1991 for his work on the proof of Hydrogen Bonding in general anaesthesia and in 2002 in recognition of his paper on the valuation of human intestinal absorption data and subsequent derivation.

The application of the Abraham descriptor analysis, a quantitative structure/activity relationship, on a wide variety of interactions resulted in 726 publications with 37,184 citations, an incredible record.

Michael was always a gentleman and good company. He could and would give his enlightened opinion on any of the problems of the day, always with courtesy and good humour. He was also a very modest man who never boasted about his superb research.

His wife, Elisabeth Mayer-Abraham died in 1999; he leaves behind two boys, Benjamin and Jonathan.