Waynflete Professor of Chemistry Professor Véronique Gouverneur has won a prestigious Royal Society Award.
The Awards recognise exceptional research achievements through a series of prestigious medals and prizes. Professor Gouverneur was awarded the Davy Medal for her outstanding contributions to the field of fluorine chemistry.
Professor Gouverneur is a pioneer in the field of fluorine chemistry, an area of research that directly benefits pharmaceutical drug development, medicine and imaging. In particular, she has transformed fluorine-based radiochemistry for applications in Positron Emission Tomography (PET), a molecular imaging technology used for disease diagnosis and drug development programmes.
Since natural fluoro-organic compounds are extremely rare, Professor Gouverneur has been instrumental in developing a ‘toolbox’ of (catalytic) reactions to generate structurally complex fluorine-substituted molecules. Many of the methods she developed are now routinely used, for instance to produce fluorine-labelled radiotracers. For diseases like cancer, this can facilitate personalised medicine as well as accelerate the discovery of new treatments.
Of the 25 awards this year, five honour Oxford University researchers for their outstanding contributions to science and medicine. Read more here.
