Dominique Massiot studied at the École normale supérieure in Paris, one of the most prestigious and competitive institutions in France. After completing his PhD in geochemistry, Massiot joined the Centre for Research on Materials at High Temperature (CRMHT) in Orléans, France, and the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS), also in France. His research focuses on the study of disorder in organic or hybrid materials through nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy of materials in solid state or melts. He helped create France’s Research Infrastructure for Nuclear Magnetic Resonance at Very High Fields (IR-NMR-THC), of which he was also director, as well as the CEMHTI laboratory (laboratoire Conditions extrêmes et matériaux: haute température et irradiation).
However, his work is not limited to the laboratory. Since 2013, Dominique Massiot has been the director of the CNRS Institute of Chemistry (INC), one of France’s 10 public research institutes that manages 133 laboratories with several thousand researchers, researcher–professors and technical staff.
He is the recipient of a number of awards and numerous prizes, including the Ivan Peychès award from the French Academy of Sciences in 1997, the CNRS Silver Medal in 2003 and, more recently, the Grammaticakis–Neumann Prize and the French Academy of Sciences’ Berthelot Medal (in the Chemistry category) in 2013. Since 2016, Dominique Massiot has been a distinguished member of the French Chemical Society (Société Chimique de France).