Courcelle earned his Ph.D. in 1976 from the French Institute for Research in Computer Science and Automation, then called IRIA, under the supervision of Maurice Nivat.
He then joined the Laboratoire Bordelais de Recherche en Informatique (LaBRI) at the University of Bordeaux 1, where he remained for the rest of his career.
[1][3] Courcelle was the first recipient of the S. Barry Cooper Prize of the Association Computability in Europe in 2020.
[5] During the COVID-19 pandemic, Courcelle protested against vaccination mandates in France.
He is known for Courcelle's theorem, which combines second-order logic, the theory of formal languages, and tree decompositions of graphs to show that a wide class of algorithmic problems in graph theory have efficient solutions.