Abstract: Small molecule pharmaceutical drugs may adsorb to and perturb the physical structure of lipids in the mammalian plasma membrane. Undergraduate students in Grace Stokes’s research lab at Santa Clara University used the laser-based analytical method, second harmonic generation (SHG), to monitored adsorption of therapeutically-relevant concentrations of neurological drugs (clozapine, olanzapine and chlorpromazine) to lipid membranes that represent the blood-brain barrier. Our second project involves a small library of peptoids, N-substituted glycine oligomers, which are easy to synthesize in an introductory organic chemistry teaching lab. Peptoids can serve as drug mimics. We conducted a systematic study of peptoid adsorption to lipid monolayers and bilayers of varying compositions. These studies quantified the molecular-level forces which drive adsorption and provided a molecular-level understanding of how chemical structure alters membrane association.