Atmospheric aerosols have have a pronounced effect on both human health and Earth's climate. Aerosol effects currently represent the largest source of error in climate change models. Organic compounds may accelerate growth in particle processes, but the mechanism by which they are involved is not well understood. Secondary organic aerosols (SOA), aerosols formed by volatile organic compounds (VOCs) undergoing gas-to-particle transfer, constitute a significant portion of all tropospheric aerosols. The primary complication stems from the role of VOCs which are thought to photooxidize or chemically oxidize in the atmosphere to yield lower volatility products that then form SOA. Estimates suggest that between 10,000 and 100,000 different organic compounds are found in the atmosphere, and each VOC can undergo a number of different degradation pathways yielding different oxidation products, which greatly complicates their inclusion in any modeling attempts. Recently, it has been established that extremely-low volatility organic compounds (ELVOCs), believed to be formed through consecutive internal hydrogen shift reactions that facilitate autoxidation reactions, play a critical role in organic enhanced nucleation. The majority of studies on the impact of VOCs in the atmosphere are focused on terpenes, in particular α-pinene, which is emitted from pine forests. A particular ozonolysis product of α-pinene, pinic acid, has become a prototypical NPF-relevant organic acid. Computational results have suggested that clusters of pinic acid and sulfuric acid are highly stabilized by hydrogen bonds, and estimates of the Gibbs free energies of formation suggest that pinic acid's primary role is in the growth of clusters rather than the nucleation of new clusters. However, there are few experimental benchmarks with which to compare these results.