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Barbara Schoepp-Cothenet graduated in Biochemistry from Montpellier SupAgro and AgroParisTech. She joined the André Verméglio’s group at the CEA Cadarache, where she performed her PhD work on the structure and function of bc1 complex in bacterial photosynthesis. Her work established for the first time the in vivo participation of the high-potential iron-sulfur protein HiPIP in bacterial photosynthesis. After being awarded with her PhD in Microbiology and Biochemistry by AgroParisTech in 1994, she spent several years of post-doc in multiple laboratories (Institut für Biologie II, Albert-Ludwigs Universität, Freiburg; Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers, Paris; Centre de Génétique Moléculaire, CNRS, Gif / Yvette ; Bioénergetique et Ingénierie des Protéines Laboratory CNRS, Marseille). She has been recruited in 1999 in the “Evolution of Bioenergetics” group (Wolfgang Nitschke, CNRS, Marseille). Since 2018 she is head of this group who has two lines of research. In the first, the group is studying selected prokaryotic energy conservation chains, with particular interest on Mo-enzymes and among them Mo-enzymes involved in arsenic and sulfur conversion, with the aim of building up a complete picture of their diversity but also to identify common features and conserved principles, including catalytic mechanisms and protein structural modules. The ultimate goal of this approach is to contribute to the elucidation of the evolutionary pathways of bioenergetics and its origins. Indeed, the common core of all these pathways potentially provides clues to the type of energy conversion that produced life in the first place. As an extension of this, the group is developing a second line of research on the original energy processes and the possible contribution of mineral precursors to these.