Associate Professor Marcus W. Drover was born in St. John's, Newfoundland (Canada) and began his chemistry career at Memorial University of Newfoundland (MUN), completing a B.Sc. (Hons.) degree in 2012 with Prof. Francesca M. Kerton in main group coordination chemistry with an emphasis on ‘green polymer’ applications. In 2016, he was granted his doctorate in chemistry from the University of British Columbia (UBC) under the co-supervision of Profs. Laurel L. Schafer and Jennifer A. Love. 

At UBC, Marcus was an NSERC Vanier scholarship holder and studied organometallic chemistry related to N,O-chelated Group 9 transition metals, which included the development of new reactions aimed at the synthesis of phosphorus-containing agrochemicals. As a PhD student, Marcus was also a Michael-Smith visiting scholar at the University of Oxford under the supervision of Prof. Andrew S. Weller working on amine-borane chemistry. As a result of his thesis work, Marcus was awarded the 2016 Canadian Institute for Chemistry’s inorganic division award for graduate research (AGWIC).

In 2017, Dr. Drover was co-chair of the Organometallics Gordon Research Seminar (GRS) in Salve Regina, RI, USA. In 2017, he began work as a joint Resnick Prize Fellow in Sustainability Science and NSERC Banting fellow at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) under the guidance of Prof. Jonas C. Peters. At Caltech, Marcus' efforts were devoted to the synthesis of new open-shell iron compounds for proton-coupled electron transfer (PCET).

On July 1, 2019 Marcus began his independent career as an Assistant Professor at the University of Windsor in Southern Ontario, Canada. In 2020, Marcus was awarded a prestigious John C. Polanyi Prize in chemistry for his contributions as an early-career researcher in the province of Ontario. In 2021, he was awarded the University of Windsor's Outstanding Community Engagement, Knowledge Transfer, and Knowledge Mobilization Award (University Wide) as well as the Faculty of Science's Outreach and Engagement Award for his work with the Global Inorganic Discussion Weekdays symposium, amongst other endeavours. In 2023, Marcus joined the editorial advisory boards of the ACS journal, Organometallics as well as the Taylor and Francis journal, Journal of Coordination Chemistry.

After four years at the University of Windsor, Marcus and his team relocated to Western University (London, ON) in July 2023 and was granted tenure to Associate Professor in July 2025.