Arthur C Cope Award for Professor Véronique Gouverneur

Professor Véronique Gouverneur has been awarded the 2022 ACS Arthur C. Cope Award, one of the highest honours bestowed by the American Chemical Society. The award recognises outstanding achievement in the field of organic chemistry, the significance of which has become apparent within the preceding five years, and is in recognition of Prof Gouverneur’s world-leading work on fluorination chemistry including methods for 18F-labelling for positron emission tomography (PET) imaging. Since 1973, the Cope award has previously only been awarded once to a UK-based scientist (Prof Steve Ley, 2018), and only once to a female academic (Prof Carolyn Bertozzi, 2017). Prof. Gouverneur said: “This is splendid news and I am truly honoured. This award reflects the dedication, hard work and creativity power of the graduate students and postdoctoral fellows that I have been very fortunate to mentor during my over 20 years at Oxford. Fluorine chemistry is an exciting yet challenging field of research, and I am very fortunate to have a programme that enables our fundamental discoveries to translate into applications that are as diverse as streamlining the production of fluorochemicals or creating probes for molecular imaging.”  Many congratulations to Veronique and her team.