Professor Anne-Sophie Duwez

Anne-Sophie Duwez currently works as a full professor in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Liege. Her research focuses on the development of probes and technologies to interface single small functional molecules with AFM.

She has spent the last decade pioneering single-molecule mechanics on synthetic molecular machines after being the first to succeed in applying AFM-based single-molecule force spectroscopy to a small molecule just a few nanometres long.

Professor Anne-Sophie Duwez

Recent AFM-related papers:

• Devaux, F., Li, X., Sluysmans, D., Maurizot, V., Bakalis, E., Zerbetto, F., Huc, I. and Duwez, A-S. (2021). ‘Single-molecule mechanics of synthetic aromatic amide helices: Ultrafast and robust non-dissipative winding’. Chem, 7(5), pp. 1333-1346.

• Sluysmans, D., Lussis, P., Fustin, C-A., Bertocco, A., Leigh, D. A. and Duwez, A-S. (2021). ‘Real-Time Fluctuations in Single-Molecule Rotaxane Experiments Reveal an Intermediate Weak Binding State during Shuttling’. Journal of The American Chemical Society, 143(5), pp. 2348-2352.

• Sluysmans, D., Zhang, L., Li, X., Garci, A., Stoddart, J. F. and Duwez, A-S. (2020). ‘Viologen Tweezers to Probe the Force of Individual Donor-Acceptor π-Interactions’. Journal of The American Chemical Society, 142(50), pp. 21153-21159.

Biography: Anne-Sophie received her PhD in Chemistry from the University of Namur (Belgium) in 1997 before joining the University of Louvain (Belgium) as a FNRS postdoctoral researcher. She returned as a senior scientist to develop single-molecule force spectroscopy by AFM following a tenure as a visiting scientist at the Max Planck Institute in Mainz, Germany between 2002 to 2003.

Anne-Sophie became an associate professor at the University of Liege (Belgium) in 2006 and received an Incentive Grant for Scientific Research from the National Fund for Scientific Research to create a new laboratory for advanced AFM techniques.

She also received the Triennial Prize (2015-2017) Agathon-De Potter for Chemistry awarded by the Royal Academy of Sciences, Letters and Arts of Belgium and more recently was awarded the 2021 Feynman Prize in Nanotechnology in the experimental category.

Website: Anne-Sophie Duwez - NanoChem (ulg.ac.be)

---

Are you a woman conducting AFM research or know of someone you would like to nominate to be featured in our next #WomenInAFM campaign? Contact us at community@nunano.com!

Also, check out our previous March 2021 Women in AFM blog post to read about more researchers. Why are we celebrating women in AFM? — NuNano AFM Probes