Sauvage was born in Paris in 1944, and earned his
PhD degree from the
Université Louis-Pasteur under the supervision of
Jean-Marie Lehn, himself a 1987 laureate of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. During his doctoral work, he contributed to the first syntheses of the
cryptand ligands. After postdoctoral research with
Malcolm L. H. Green, he returned to
Strasbourg, where he is now emeritus professor. Sauvage's scientific work has focused on creating molecules that mimic the functions of machines by changing their conformation in response to an external signal. His Nobel Prize work was done in 1983, when he was the first to synthesize a
catenane, a complex of two
interlocking ring-shaped molecules, which were
bonded mechanically rather than chemically. Because these two rings can move relative to each other, the Nobel Prize cited this as a vital initial effort towards making
molecular machine. The other two recipients of the prize followed up by later creating a
rotaxane and a
molecular rotor. Other research includes
electrochemical reduction of CO2 and models of the
photosynthetic reaction center. A large theme of his work is molecular
topology, specifically
mechanically-interlocked molecular architectures. He has described syntheses of
catenanes and
molecular knots based on coordination complexes. He was elected a correspondent member of the
French Academy of Sciences on 26 March 1990, and became a member on 24 November 1997. He is currently emeritus professor at the
University of Strasbourg (Unistra). He shared the 2016 Nobel Prize in Chemistry "for the design and synthesis of
molecular machines" with
Sir J. Fraser Stoddart and
Bernard L. Feringa. He was elected a foreign associate of the US
National Academy of Sciences in April 2019. , Sauvage has an
h-index of 109 according to
Google Scholar and of 100 according to
Scopus. ==Honours==