Champaign, Illinois - February 25, 2012 - The winner of the Weber Award was announced during the Annual Meeting of the Biophysical Society in San Diego, California. The award has been consigned to Prof. Bernard Valeur.

Bernard Valeur is emeritus professor at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers (CNAM) in Paris where he taught physical chemistry for almost thirty years. He is a member of the laboratory of Photophysique et Photochimie Supramoléculaires et Macromoléculaires at the École Normale Supérieure de Cachan.

Prof. Valeur received his engineering diploma from the École Supérieure de Physique et de Chimie Industrielles de Paris (ESPCI) and his PhD degree from the Université Pierre-et-Marie-Curie (Paris). He was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in Gregorio Weber's laboratory. After being an associate professor at ESPCI, he became full professor of physical chemistry at CNAM in 1979.

Prof. Valeur served as an elected member of the French Comité National de la Recherche Scientifique from 1995 to 2000. He was a member of the permanent steering committee of the International Conference on Methods and Applications of Fluorescence Spectroscopy from 1995 to 2008, and he was the chairman and organizer of the 6th conference of this series in Paris. He is an IUPAC fellow (International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry). He serves at the editorial boards of the Journal of Fluorescence, Journal of Photochemistry and Photobiology A, ChemPhysChem.

Prof. Valeur's research interests are in the fields of photophysics and photochemistry. He has been currently using steady-state and time-resolved fluorescence techniques for investigating polymers, microemulsions, supramolecular systems including multichromophoric cyclodextrins and calixarenes. He is one of the pioneers in the development of fluoroionophores consisting of fluorophores linked to ionophores for highly selective sensing of metal ions, especially toxic heavy metal ions in environment. His present research includes reversible photoswitchable molecular tweezers for release and capture of calcium ions in order to study calcium-dependent biological processes, and light-driven molecular shuttles of ions for information storage at a nanometric scale (with read-out by fluorescence).

Prof. Valeur enjoyed numerous collaborations with biologists and biophysicists: Jean-Pierre Changeux, Gregorio Weber, Enrico Gratton, Claude Hélène, Michel Monsigny, Jean-Claude Brochon and others.

Prof. Valeur is the author or coauthor of over 170 articles or book chapters, co-editor of one book, and single author of 5 books including the bestseller Molecular Fluorescence: Principles and Applications.