Véronique Gouverneur
Véronique Gouverneur (born 8 November 1964 in Geel, Belgium) is a professor of chemistry at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom. She also holds a tutorial fellowship at Merton College, Oxford. Her research on fluorine chemistry has received many professional and scholarly awards. Education. Gouverneur obtained her undergraduate degree (a master's degree in chemistry), and then in 1991 her doctorate, from the Université catholique de Louvain. She moved in 1992 to the Scripps Research Institute in the US, returning to Europe in 1994. She accepted a position of Maître de Conférence at Louis Pasteur University , working with C. Miokowski and was associate member of the Institut de Science et d'Ingénierie Supramoléculaires. Career and research. She joined the department of chemistry at Oxford in 1998, becoming reader in 2006 and professor in 2008. 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. She has also had visiting professor posts at the University of Paris X and the Shanghai Institute of Organic Chemistry. Awards and honours. Gouverneur won the AstraZeneca Research Award for organic  chemistry in 2005. She was the 2008 winner of the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) Bader award, "for her important contributions to synthetic organofluorine chemistry." In 2010, she was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry and received the IUPAC Distinguished Woman in Chemistry Award. In 2011 she was awarded the Liebig Lectureship Award of the Organic Division of the German Chemical Society. In 2012, she was holding the Blaise Pascal Chair (ENS/CEA, France). In 2013, the UK's Royal Society selected her as one of 27 Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award holders. 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 [F] radiochemistry for applications in Positron Emission Tomography." In 2016, she was an International Visiting Research Scholar of the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies (University of British Columbia) and held the Tetrahedron Chair at the Belgian Organic Synthesis Symposium (BOSS) meeting. 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. In 2017, Gouverneur become an  elected member of the European Academy of Sciences (EURASC). She received a European Research Council Advanced Grant in 2018. In 2019, she received the RSC Organic Stereochemistry Award and the Prelog Medal (ETH). In the same year, she was the president of the Bürgenstock Conference—the Swiss Chemical Society conference on stereochemistry—and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2019.