Paul Lecoq earned his degree in Instrumentation Physics Engineering from the École Polytechnique of Grenoble in 1972, under the supervision of Nobel Laureate Louis Néel. After two years of work at the Nuclear Physics Laboratory of the University of Montreal, Canada, he received his Ph.D. in Nuclear Physics in 1974. Since then, he has worked at CERN on five major international experiments in particle physics, one of them led by Nobel Laureate Samuel Ting.

His contributions to detector instrumentation, particularly in heavy inorganic scintillating materials, received strong support from Carlo Rubbia and Georges Charpak, both Nobel Prize winners in Physics. He served as the technical coordinator of the electromagnetic calorimeter of the CMS experiment at CERN, which played a key role in the discovery of the Higgs boson.

Paul Lecoq is the founder of the Crystal Clear international collaboration based at CERN, which brings together 28 institutes and companies from around the world contributing to the advancement of scintillator science. He also established the SCINT conference series in 1991, which gathers the international community every two years to discuss fundamental aspects, production technologies, and applications of scintillators.

He was elected member of the European Academy of Sciences in 2008 and became Head of the Physics Division of the Academy in 2017. In 2013, he was awarded an Advanced Grant from the European Research Council for the Time Imaging Calorimetry project, and in 2015, he was elected IEEE Fellow.