Marc Fontecave is a former student of the École normale supérieure de l'enseignement technique, where he obtained the agrégation de sciences physiques, option chimie, in 1978. After starting his career at the CNRS, obtaining his PhD in 1984 and a postdoctoral fellowship at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden (1985-1986), he became a professor at Grenoble's Joseph-Fourier University in 1988. After setting up a research team on the university campus, he went on to create and run the Laboratoire de chimie et biologie des métaux at the CEA-Grenoble center.

In 2008, he became Professor at the Collège de France, where he holds the Chemistry of Biological Processes Chair, and heads the Chemistry of Biological Processes Laboratory, a joint research unit of the Collège de France-CNRS-Sorbonne University.

Marc Fontecave specializes 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 : cofactor biosynthesis, RNA modification. In addition, through a bioinspired approach, he is developing new molecular and solid catalysts, notably for the development of new electrochemical solar energy storage technologies : decomposition of water into oxygen and hydrogen, and electrolysis of carbon dioxide.