Véronique Gouverneur

Biosketch

Véronique Gouverneur is the Distinguished Waynflete Professor of Chemistry at the University of Oxford and Magdalen College. She earned her PhD in Chemistry at the Université Catholique de Louvain (LLN, Belgium), under the supervision of Prof Ghosez. She was a postdoctoral fellow with Prof. Lerner at the Scripps Research Institute (California, USA) then took a position of Maître de Conférence at the University Louis Pasteur in Strasbourg (France); during this period, she worked with Dr Mioskowski and was Associate Member of the Institut de Science et d’Ingénierie Supramoléculaires led by Prof Lehn. She then moved to the University of Oxford in 1998 in the Department of Chemistry where she was promoted Professor in 2008. Until 2022, she held a tutorial fellowship at Merton College Oxford prior to taking her current position. Her body of work was recognised with numerous international prizes and awards including more recently the ACS Award for Creative work in Fluorine Chemistry, RSC Tilden Prize, RSC Organic Stereochemistry Award, Prelog Medal, Henri Moissan Prize, Arthur C. Cope Award, EuChemS Female Organic Chemist of the Year Award, Prous Institute – Overton and Meyer Award, Davy Medal, Wei-Yuan Huang Fluorine Chemistry Prize of Chinese Chemical Society, and the French Chemical Society French-Great-Britain Prize. She is a Member of the European Academy of Sciences (EURASC), a Fellow of the Royal Society (UK), an International Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (USA) and an International Member of the US National Academy of Sciences (USA).

Research Interests

Dr Gouverneur's research is centred on fluorine chemistry with the aim to advance knowledge and improve our quality of life. Her methods have accelerated pharmaceutical drug discovery as well as Positron Emission Tomography discovery programs for patient healthcare. This work has enhanced our fundamental understanding of fluoride reactivity, and led to hydrogen bonding phase transfer catalysis, a manifold with impact beyond fluorination chemistry. More recently, she launched a new research direction on sustainable and safe circular fluorine chemistry. Specifically, she demonstrated that the mineral fluorspar (CaF2) can be directly converted into diverse fluorochemicals with processes bypassing the manufacturing and transport of dangerous HF. This discovery has attracted visibility worldwide in academia and industry, and has led her to found FluoRok, a spin-out of the University of Oxford. She has also invented technologies that destroy poly- and perfluoroalkylated substances with quantitative recovery of their fluorine content for re-entry in the fluorochemical industry.