His primary areas of study include statistical physics, non-equilibrium thermodynamics, and complex systems.
He completed his master's degree in 1985 and his Ph.D. in 1989, both in physics at the University of Buenos Aires under Daniel R. Bes.
He conducted postdoctoral research at the Weizmann Institute of Science in 1990[4] in the group of Eytan Domany and at the Sapienza University of Rome from 1991 to 1994.
Kurchan joined École normale supérieure de Lyon as an associate researcher.
Kurchan co-edited Europhysics Letters from 2002 to 2005 and currently edits Journal of Statistical Physics (2003–2014, 2018–present) and SciPost (2018–present).