Anne-Sophie Duwez

Full professor 

Anne-Sophie Duwez obtained her PhD in chemistry in 1997 at the University of Namur. She then joined the University of Louvain as a FNRS postdoctoral researcher. From 2002 to 2003, she was visiting scientist at the Max Planck Institute in Mainz, Germany. She then returned to the University of Louvain as a senior scientist to develop single-molecule force spectroscopy by AFM.

In 2006, she was appointed associate professor at the University of Liege and obtained an Incentive Grant for Scientific Research from the National Fund for Scientific Research (FNRS) to create a new laboratory for advanced AFM techniques. She is currently a full professor in the Department of Chemistry. Her research focuses on the development of probes and technologies to interface single small functional molecules with AFM.

A landmark achievement was the first example of selectively breaking and creating a single bond in a synthetic system by a classical reaction of organic chemistry in solution. Subsequently, when single-molecule force spectroscopy was still exclusively the domain of macromolecules (mainly proteins), she was the first to succeed in applying it to a small molecule just a few nm long. The group have built on those studies over the past decade, pioneering single-molecule mechanics on small molecules and synthetic molecular machines in a series of high impact and influential studies.

She received the Triennial Prize (2015-2017) Agathon-De Potter for chemistry, awarded by the Royal Academy of Sciences, Letters and Arts of Belgium. She is also the recipient of the 2021 Feyman Prize (in experiment).