Véronique Gouverneur Receives Ojima Distinguished Lectureship Award in Chemistry
On April 25, the Department of Chemistry, Institute of Chemical Biology and Drug Discovery (ICB&DD) and the College of Arts and Sciences hosted the 2025 Ojima Distinguished Lectureship Award honoring Véronique Gouverneur, Waynflete Professor of Chemistry of University of Oxford. The event took place in the Charles B. Wang Center.
Established in 2020 to commemorate Professor Iwao Ojima’s 75th birthday, the award is based on an endowment from the Ojima family to help ensure that eminent scholars such as Véronique Gouverneur can continue to enrich the Department of Chemistry and Stony Brook University.
Stanislaus Wong, distinguished professor and chair of the Department of Chemistry, provided the opening remarks, thanking Professor Iwao Ojima and his wife Yoko Ojima for their generosity as well as their outstanding philanthropic work throughout the years. Wong expressed great appreciation for Professor Ojima and added that the Department of Chemistry is truly honored to have him as one of their faculty, not only as a valued and esteemed mentor to their junior colleagues but also as an insightful, illustrious and well-respected colleague. Professor Ojima has been and always will be an incomparable asset to the department and to the university, he concluded.
Jeffrey Lipshultz, assistant professor in the Department of Chemistry, introduced the invited speaker Véronique Gouverneur, who gave a lecture entitled “Rethinking Fluorine Chemistry with Global Challenges in Mind.”
Gouverneur received her PhD at the Catholic University of Louvain in Belgium under the guidance of Léon Ghosez, followed by a postdoc stay at Scripps with Richard Lerner. She returned to Europe as a lecturer at University Louis Pasteur in Strasbourg before starting at Oxford in 1998, progressing from lecturer to reader to professor in 2008. In 2022, she was named Waynflete Professor. Also in 2022, she founded a company, FluoRok, which is working to commercialize some of the advances in fluorine and fluoride chemistry developed in her lab.
She has been recognized by highly prestigious awards, most notably the Davy Medal in 2024 from the Royal Society, which is considered to be a prelude to the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, as well as the Henri Moissan Prize for Fluorine Chemistry in 2022 and Arthur C. Cope Award from the American Chemical Society (ACS) in 2022, which is the most prestigious ACS Award in organic chemistry (one of just two women recipients in over 50 years). She has received numerous other prestigious awards, including the ACS Award for Creative work in Fluorine Chemistry (2015), Prelog Medal (2019), as well as Tilden Prize (2016), Organic Stereochemistry Award (2019), and Bader Award (2008) from the Royal Society of Chemistry. She was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS, 2019), an International Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2022), and a Fellow of the European Academy of Sciences (2017) and Royal Society of Chemistry (2010).
Gouverneur’s research has focused on the design and invention of new strategies for the synthesis of fluorine-containing molecules, an area of research that can directly benefit numerous sectors in the life sciences and materials science, e.g., most notably PET imaging. More recently, she has also been working on developing sustainable and safe synthetic methods for the production of fluorides, which are essential basic chemicals that are being used in medicine and battery technology, as well as applications of various approaches to the direct production of fluorochemicals by taking into account the global challenges of decarbonization and resource conservation, while avoiding the previously hazardous production steps for fluorochemicals.
The lecture was followed by the presentation of the award plaque by Professor Ojima to Professor Gouverneur.
Professor Iwao Ojima received his BS, MS and PhD degrees from The University of Tokyo, Japan. He was a senior research fellow at the Sagami Institute of Chemical Research until 1983, at which time he joined Stony Brook University’s Department of Chemistry as an associate professor. In 1984 he was appointed professor, then leading professor in 1991 and distinguished professor in 1995. Ojima was the department chair from 1997 to 2003 and has been serving as the founding director for the Institute of Chemical Biology and Drug Discovery since 2003, and as president of the Stony Brook University chapter of the National Academy of Inventors since 2016.
In recognition of his seminal contributions to the chemical sciences, Professor Ojima has received many prestigious honors, including national awards in four different disciplines in chemistry from the American Chemical Society, i.e., Arthur C. Cope Scholar Award, E. B. Hershberg Award, ACS Award for Creative Work in Fluorine Chemistry and Ernest Guenther Award in the Chemistry of Natural Products. He was inducted into the Medicinal Chemistry Hall of Fame of the American Chemical Society, received the Chemical Society of Japan Award, and Outstanding Inventor Award from the Research Foundation of the State University of New York. Ojima is an elected fellow of the J.S. Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, American Association for the Advancement of Science, New York Academy of Sciences, American Chemical Society, National Academy of Inventors and European Academy of Sciences.