Marc Fontecave is an alumnus of the École normale supérieure de l’enseignement technique, where he earned his agrégation in physical sciences, with a concentration in chemistry, in 1978. After beginning his career at the CNRS, earning his doctoral degree in 1984, and completing a postdoctoral fellowship at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden (1985–1986), he became a professor at Joseph-Fourier University in Grenoble in 1988. After establishing a research team on the university campus, he founded and directed the Laboratory of Metal Chemistry and Biology at the CEA-Grenoble center.
In 2008, he became a professor at the Collège de France, where he holds the Chair in the Chemistry of Biological Processes and directs the Laboratory of Chemistry of Biological Processes, a joint research unit of the Collège de France, CNRS, and Sorbonne University.
Marc Fontecave is a specialist in chemistry at the interface with biology. He studies the structure and reactivity of complex enzymatic sites—metal centers within metalloenzymes and organic cofactors within flavoenzymes—involved in various metabolic and biosynthetic pathways, such as cofactor biosynthesis and RNA modification. Furthermore, using a bio-inspired approach, he is developing new molecular and solid-state catalysts, particularly for the development of new electrochemical technologies for solar energy storage: the decomposition of water into oxygen and hydrogen, and the electrolysis of carbon dioxide.
