Marcel Swart obtained his PhD degree at Univ. Groningen under the guidance of Prof. Berendsen, Prof. Canters and Prof. Snijders. After postdoctoral stays, he was appointed ICREA Junior (2006) and ICREA Professor (2009) at Univ. Girona, where he obtained a part-time Full Prof position in 2024. He organized Girona Seminars on Predictive Catalysis (2016, 2018), was Chair of COST Action CM1305 (2014-18), Editor for the first textbook on spin states (Wiley, 2015), Director of the IQCC institute (2015-23) and member of a SAPEA Working Group (WP6, Early and mid-career researchers). He is Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry (2015), member of Academia Europaea (2019), Editor for Inorg. Chim. Acta, and Advisor for Open Research Europe (EC). He won the 5th MGMS Silver Jubilee Prize (2012), received a special award in honor of his continuous support for advancing chemical sciences in Serbia (2017), and in 2025 he was one of the PIs of a team that were awarded the 2025 Dalton Horizon Prize.

He focuses on the study of electrons in transition-metals during catalysis and in the formation of nanomaterials and supramolecular structures. He paved the way and designed new density functionals which enables him to show how electrons flow in transition metal catalysts by jumping from one spin state to another, enabling the corresponding fingerprinting through computational spectroscopy (IR, NMR, UV-Vis, Mössbauer). Recently he (re)started to work on supramolecular chemistry and nanomaterials, focusing on the characterization of these systems through computational chemistry, providing one-to-one mapping to experimental results. In collaboration with experimentalists from all over the world, combined studies have led to enhanced understanding of how small changes in the chemical structure can lead to profound changes in spectroscopy and reactivity.