Meet: Benoit Champagne, President of the Walloon Royal Society of Chemistry

Benoit Champagne was elected President of the Société Royale de Chimie (SRC), the Walloon Royal Society of Chemistry in February 2018.

He received his PhD in 1992 in Chemistry at the University of Namur, then known as the Facultés Universitaires Notre Dame de la Paix, FUNDPand in 1994, received the IBM Belgium Award of Computer Science for his PhD work.

Benoit accomplished post-doctoral stays at the Quantum Theory Project (Gainesville, Florida) and at the University of California in Santa Barbara. In 1995, he obtained a permanent position as Research Associate of the Belgian National Fund for Scientific Research (FNRS) and, after presenting his Habilitation thesis in 2001, was promoted Senior Research Associate of the FNRS. In October 2005 he became Research Director of the Fund for scientific research at the FNRS.  In September 2009, he was recruited as Chargé de cours (Assistant Professor) at the University of Namur and, since October 2012, he is Full Professor.

Since 2000, he has been involved in the management, including Fund raising, of the interuniversity Scientific Computing Facility (iSCF) installed at the FUNDP, now the High-Performance Computing Technological Platform of the University of Namur, which provides computing power to Physicists and Chemists. More recently, he has contributed to the creation of the Consortium des Équipements de Calcul Intensif (CÉCI) of the Fédération Wallonie Bruxelles.

He is currently the President of the newly-created Namur Institute of Structured Matter. In 2002 Benoit received the Wiley-International Journal of Quantum Chemistry Award and one year later the Triennial Prize of the Royal Chemical Society (SRC). He was recently awarded a Francqui research professor position for the period 2012-2015. Benoit is presently member of the Editorial Board of Int. J. Quantum Chemistry (Wiley), Theor. Chem. Acc. (Springer), Photonics (MDPI), and Comput. Theor. Chem. (Elsevier). He was a member of the Advisory Editorial Board of J. Phys. Chem. A-B-C in 2009-2011. He is Redaction Director of Chimie Nouvelle, the SRC journal, and has co-authored some 450 papers and presented over 130 talks.