[2][3] He is a former researcher at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg, Germany, and an honorary professor of biophysics at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland.

[3][4] In 2017, he received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry together with Joachim Frank and Richard Henderson "for developing cryo-electron microscopy for the high-resolution structure determination of biomolecules in solution".

[5][6] He received the Royal Photographic Society Progress Medal, alongside his colleagues Professor Joachim Frank and Dr Richard Henderson, in 2018 for 'an important advance in the scientific or technological development of photography or imaging in the widest sense'.

[4] He obtained a Certificate of Molecular Biology at University of Geneva in 1969 and then began to study electron microscopy of DNA.

[8] From 1978 to 1987, Dubochet was group leader at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg, then part of West Germany.