Marc Leroy establishes the individual consultance company Space4Dev in 2019. Its goal is to support joint European – African projects of public and private actors in the field of space applications. His main Customers since then have been the Pixstart, BRLi and HYGEOS companies and Cnes, the French Space Agency.

This move is relying on 34 years of experience as an engineer in Cnes , from 1985 to 2018. 

From 2001 to 2018, he devotes himself to the direction of multi-partner projects of development of geoinformation services using space data at national, european and african levels. He enters the public interest group Medias-France in 2001 and leads there the precursor project of the French Land data center Theia . He also coordinates there the European project Geoland, precursor of the Copernicus Land satellite service of the European Union. From 2009 to 2011, he is detached in Ird , which missions him at the African Union Commission in Addis Ababa as technical director of the AMESD project (African Monitoring of Environment for Sustainable Development using space data). He comes back to Cnes in 2012 to be the technical director of Theia, and becomes in 2016 expert on space applications, with the mandate to promote the use of space technologies at international level, in particular in Africa.

From 1985 to 2000, he works at Cnes and Cesbio as an academic researcher and as an engineer on problems of physics of the measurement of the optical signal of satellites of Earth Observation. 

He is a Researcher in plasma physics on the structure of the Earth's bow shock, both at University of Maryland and Observatoire de Paris from 1980 to 1984.

Marc Leroy is a former student of Ecole Normale Supérieure (St-Cloud) in Physics, and has obtained a PHD at Paris VII University in 1980 in the field of radiatively driven stellar winds. 

Miscellaneous

• April 1988 - Brazil - Trainer at Saõ José dos Campos (INPE)
• March 1993 - Algeria - Field campaign in Sahara for the calibration of space sensors
• Sept. 2002 - Niger - Cooperation with Agryhmet
• Jan. 2015 - Several West African and IOC countries - Short Term Expertise for the MESA project on National Remote Sensing Network
• 2019 - Commercial prospection for Pixstart in Algeria, Senegal, Mali, and Cameroon 
• 2022 : Field study for BRLi in Cambodia
  

• Chairman, International Symposium on Physical Measurements in Remote Sensing, Aussois, 2001
• Co-chairman, International Group on CNES Future Space Missions “Terrestrial Environment Monitoring Mission Working Group (TEMMWG)”: 2000-2001 
• Scientific Committee Member of a number of International Workshops 1994 – 2002

Marc Leroy is author or co-author of a number of scientific publications published in the period 1980 – 2000: 80 papers in peer-reviewed international scientific journals, 6 contributions to books, 5 broad public papers, 4 papers of invited conferences, 55 communications published in the proceedings of international conferences. For a complete publication record see www.researchgate.net . The quotation index of his publications is above 8000. Several publications have been cited 500 to 1000 times (conception of the POLDER space instrument (1994); model of bidirectional surface reflectance (1992); the structure of perpendicular bow shocks in collisionless plasmas (1982)).