Professor Gouverneur's fluorine research receives significant EU funding

Merton's Professor Véronique Gouverneur has obtained an Advanced Grant of €2.5 million from the European Research Council (ERC) to develop a new catalytic manifold inspired by the natural fluorinase enzyme, that she has coined 'Hydrogen Bonding Phase Transfer Catalysis', or HBPTC.

Catalysis—the acceleration of a chemical reaction by a catalyst—is essential to all areas of modern life, and today, the need for new technologies to address the change in use of raw materials has encouraged chemists to redefine how we approach chemical production. High on the list are the need for new catalysis concepts and catalytic asymmetric reactions – reactions that control the formation of one of two mirror-image molecules, critically important because these molecules can display drastically different properties for applications in drug discovery; novel or improved catalysts; and a better understanding of mechanisms. This is exactly what Véronique proposes to do: applying HBPTC to transform ‘feedstock’ reagents – for example, inorganic salts such as sodium chloride (NaCl) or potassium fluoride (KF) - into high-value fine chemicals for applications in drug discovery.

Véronique commented:

“I am in the privileged situation to be awarded an ERC grant to support our research. I cannot emphasise enough how important access to ERC funding is to support adventurous, exciting and much-needed science. We all need this type of funding for 'blue sky' projects, as well as amazing talented young scientists from all over the world to work on them in our research groups.”

Véronique's prominence in this field will be recognised again next month, as she takes up the presidency of the Swiss Chemical Society's 54th Bürgenstock Conference, a multidisciplinary conference where frontier science is discussed.