Coulombe obtained his bachelor"s degree in Biochemistry (1981) and his Doctor of Philosophy in Molecular Biology (1988) at the University of Montreal before undertaking postdoctoral work at the University of Toronto and the Free University of Brussels (Université libre de Bruxelles (Free University of Brussels)).
Coulombe is best known for his "promoter wrapping model" for transcriptional initiation by multi-subunit Ribonucleic acid polymerases (), which has been described in molecular biology textbooks (). More recently, his laboratory has used protein affinity purification coupled with mass spectrometry to generate high-resolution maps of the interactome of human Ribonucleic acid polymerases (,). In 2012, the Coulombe laboratory discovered that methylation of molecular chaperones is a central element of a posttranslational modification code, they termed the "chaperone code", that orchestrates the functional organization of the proteome ().
