Prof. Devoret graduated from Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Télécommunications in Paris in 1975 and started graduate work in molecular quantum physics at the University of Orsay. He then joined Professor Anatole Abragam's laboratory in CEA-Saclay to work on NMR in solid hydrogen, and received his PhD from Paris University in 1982. He spent two post-doctoral years working on macroscopic quantum tunneling with John Clarke's laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley. He pursued this research on quantum mechanical electronics upon his return to Saclay, starting his own research group with Daniel Esteve and Cristian Urbina. The main achievements of the "quantronics group" were the measurement of the traversal time of tunneling, the invention of the single electron pump (now the basis of a new standard of capacitance), the first observation of the charge of Cooper pairs and the first measurement of the effect of atomic valence on the conductance of a single atom. He became director of research of the Commissariat à l'Energie Atomique (CEA) at Saclay. Michel Devoret has received the Ampere Prize of the Fench Academy of Science (together with Daniel Esteve), the Descartes-Huygens Prize of the Royal Academy of Science of the Netherlands and the Europhysics-Agilent Prize of the European Physical Society (together with Daniel Esteve, Hans Mooij and Yasunobu Nakamura).

Currently a faculty member at Yale University, he focuses his research on experimental solid state physics with emphasis on quantum mechanical electronics or "quantronics". In this new type of electronics, electrical collective degrees of freedom like currents and voltages behave quantum mechanically. These effects are particularly important in the realization of quantum coherent Cooper pair devices for quantum computation, which is his main research goal. The lab is also investigating whether superconductivity exists at the single molecule level.