Michel Lagarde is a University Professor Emeritus at INSA-Lyon (Lyon university), France. He started his research career at the Pasteur Institute of Lyon, localized in a University Hospital, then spent around ten years as a researcher at Inserm, the French Medical Research Council/National Institute of Health, before having a university position to teach structural and metabolic biochemistry and pursuing his research on lipids. His research interest relates with membrane lipids and lipid mediators generated in blood and vascular cells, in response to specific activators, especially in the context of aging and diabetes mellitus. These lipid mediators are mainly oxygenated derivatives of polyunsaturated fatty acids of nutritional value.

After his PhD in Biochemistry and his Doctorate in Sciences, he benefited from a post-doctoral stay at the Department of Biochemistry, Royal College of Surgeons of England in London. Then following his Doctorate in Human Biology (Hematology & Immunology), he benefited from three short sabbatical stays at the Department of Pharmacology, University of Illinois, Chicago, at the Department of Biochemistry, Michigan State University, East Lansing, and at the Department of Biochemistry and Chemistry, University of California in San Diego.

He founded the Institute for Multidisciplinary Biochemistry of Lipids (IMBL) in Lyon, and was the director of a functional lipidomics platform for 10 years. He has been president of several scientific societies (GERLI, ICBL and ISSFAL). He is co-author of around 500 publications, with an H-index of 53 according to the web of science.