From 1977 to 1981, Olivier Debarre attended the École Normale Supérieure (ENS) and he studied under Phillip Griffiths at Harvard University in 1981–1982. In 1987, he received his Ph.D. in a two-part thesis from the University of Paris XI. His "Thèse d´Etat", under Arnaud Beauville, was entitled Variétés de Prym, conjecture de la trisécante et ensembles d'Andreotti et Mayer and his "Seconde Thèse", under Michael Robert Herman, was entitled Conjugaison analytique à des rotations des difféomorphismes analytiques du cercle.[1][2]
From 1982 to 1987, Debarre was a scientific researcher at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS). He then moved to the United States, and was hired as an associate professor at the University of Iowa, where he taught from 1991 to 1994. Back in France in 1995, he became a professor at the University of Strasbourg, where he stayed until 2008. Since 2008, he has been teaching both at the University of Paris VII and at the École Normale Supérieure, where in 2009–2010 he was chair of the faculty.