He earned his Ph.D. degree from the University of Strasbourg, France, in 2005. He worked at the Fritz Haber Institute of the Max Planck Society in Germany from 2005 to 2010 and in the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at the University of Delaware from 2010 to 2012. He then joined Iowa State University (ISU) as a faculty in 2012 and became a member of the NSF Engineering Research Center for Biorenewable Chemicals (CBiRC). In 2015, he co-founded Sumatra Biorenewables LLC to translate ISU technology for the production bio-advantaged polymers. Prof. Tessonnier has published over 70 peer-reviewed publications and is a co-inventor on 9 patents