Véronique Gouverneur

Véronique Gouverneur (born 8 November 1964 in Geel, Belgium) is a Belgian-British chemist. She is the Waynflete Professor of Chemistry at Magdalen College at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom. Prior to the Waynflete professorship, she held 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),

Career and research She joined the department of chemistry at Oxford in 1998, becoming reader in 2006 and professor in 2008. She has also had visiting professor posts at the University of Paris X and the Shanghai Institute of Organic Chemistry. In 2022, she was appointed as the Waynflete Professor of Chemistry, a post that dates back to 1865.

Awards and honours Gouverneur won the AstraZeneca Research Award for organic chemistry in 2005. 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 [18F] 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. 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 and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2022, she also received the European Chemical Society's award for Female Organic Chemist of the Year.