Clotilde Policar is a professor at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris, within Université Paris Sciences et Lettres (PSL), where she leads a research group in bioinorganic chemistry and inorganic chemical biology (Metals in Biology and Redox Homeostasis https://ens-bic.fr/). After having developed low-molecular-weight mimics of metalloproteins for reactivity or as spectroscopic surrogates of proteins metallic active sites (manganese-peroxidase, Mn-cluster of the oxygen evolving center, Mn-superoxide dismutase), she wanted to study these complexes directly in cells. Her main current interest focuses, on the one hand, on the design of catalytic metal-based antioxidants bioinspired from antioxidant metalloproteins and their evaluation in cells. On the other hand, she works on metal-based probes (or tags), notably metal–carbonyl as multimodal bio-probes and organelles trackers that they have validated for non-conventional bio-imaging, in IR and X-fluorescence.

Throughout her career, Prof. Policar has been commitment to serving the scientific community. She was an editorial board member of the Journal of Inorganic Biochemistry, advisory board member for the ACS Inorganic Chemistry. She is former deputy science director (DAS) at the Institut de Chimie (INC) in CNRS, where she was involved in promoting interdisciplinarity at the level of the CNRS (national wide service). Since 2020, she is the dean of the sciences education ENS-PSL. She was a council member of the Society in Bioinorganic Chemistry (SBIC, https://www.sbichem.org/) before being elected as the president (2022-2024) and she is now past the SBIC president. She received the Gay-Lussac award from the French Academy of sciences in 2022.