Marc Zabeau (b. Lier, 1949) is a Belgian scientist and businessman.
Marc Zabeau graduated in 1971 as licentiate in zoology at the University of Ghent and obtained a PhD in 1974 on the genetics of Escherichia coli in the lab of Jeff Schell.
In 1976, on an NFWO scholarship as a Fullbright Hayes postdoctoral fellow, he went for two years to the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, (New York, USA). From 1978 until 1983 he worked at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg, Germany. during his stay in Heidelberg, he was appointed as Professor of Genetic Engineering at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel.
In 1983, he became Director Research of Plant Genetic Systems N.V. (Ghent, Belgium) and in 1986 Director Intellectual Property and Business Development. He founded several biotech companies, such as Helix CV.(Ghent, 1988), KeyeGene N.V. (Wageningen, 1989), GenScope Inc. (USA, 1995) and Methexis (Ghent, 1997). In 1999, he succeeded Marc Van Montagu as scientific directory of the Flanders Institute for Biotechnology (VIB) department of Department of Plant Systems Biology. In 2002, he was succeeded by Dirk Inzé. In 1999, he was appointed as full-time Professor Genome Biology and Functional Genomics at the University of Ghent.
He is currently General Manager of Ghent University's TechTransfer [1] and CEO of Trinean [2]