Véronique Gouverneur

Véronique Gouverneur FRS (born 8 November 1964 in Geel, Belgium) is the Waynflete Professor of Chemistry at Magdalen College at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom.^[1][5] Prior to the Waynflete professorship, she held a tutorial fellowship at Merton College, Oxford.^[3] Her research on fluorine chemistry has received many professional and scholarly awards.^[6]

Gouverneur obtained her undergraduate degree (a master's degree in chemistry),^[2] and then in 1991 her doctorate, from the Université catholique de Louvain.^[3] She moved in 1992 to the Scripps Research Institute in the US, returning to Europe in 1994.^[3] She accepted a position of Maître de Conférence at Louis Pasteur University, working with Charles Mioskowski and was associate member of the Institut de Science et d'Ingénierie Supramoléculaires.^[7]

She joined the department of chemistry at Oxford in 1998, becoming reader in 2006^[8] and professor in 2008.^[3] In her research career, she chose fluorine chemistry as a distinctive area to focus on because fluorine compounds have many applications, including in pharmaceutical drugs and in positron emission tomography (PET) scans.^[6] She has also had visiting professor posts at the University of Paris X and the Shanghai Institute of Organic Chemistry.^[9] In 2022, she was appointed as the Waynflete Professor of Chemistry, a post that dates back to 1865.^[10][11]

Gouverneur won the AstraZeneca Research Award for organic chemistry in 2005.^[8] She was the 2008 winner of the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) Bader Award, "for her important contributions to synthetic organofluorine chemistry."^[12] In 2010, she was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry^[13] and received the IUPAC Distinguished Woman in Chemistry Award.^[14] In 2011 she was awarded the Liebig Lectureship Award of the Organic Division of the German Chemical Society.^[15] In 2012, she was holding the Blaise Pascal Chair (ENS/CEA, France).^[16][17] In 2013, the UK's Royal Society selected her as one of 27 Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award holders.^[18] In 2015, Gouverneur received the American Chemical Society Award for Creative Work in Fluorine Chemistry "for her contribution to late-stage fluorination and for invigorating creatively the field of [¹⁸F] radiochemistry for applications in Positron Emission Tomography."^[19] In 2016, she was an International Visiting Research Scholar of the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies (University of British Columbia)^[20] and held the Tetrahedron Chair at the Belgian Organic Synthesis Symposium (BOSS) meeting.^[21] That year, she received the RSC Tilden Prize for her interdisciplinary work in the area of organofluorine chemistry and radiochemistry, and the impact of her discoveries in medicine.^[22][23]

In 2017, Gouverneur become an elected member of the European Academy of Sciences (EURASC).^[24] She received a European Research Council Advanced Grant in 2018.^[25] In 2019, she received the RSC Organic Stereochemistry Award^[26] and the Prelog Medal (ETH).^[27] In the same year, she was the president of the Bürgenstock Conference—the Swiss Chemical Society conference on stereochemistry^[28]—and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2019.^[29] In 2021, she was awarded the Henri Moissan International Prize for her work in fluorine chemistry. In 2022, she received the Arthur C. Cope Award conferred by the American Chemical Society^[30] and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.^[31] In 2022, she also received the European Chemical Society's award for Female Organic Chemist of the Year.^[11]