Yoan Simon

Yoan is a core faculty within both the School of Molecular Sciences and the Biodesign Center for Sustainable Macromolecular Materials (SM3) and Manufacturing at Arizona State University.

Yoan holds a Bachelor’s and Master’s degree from the Ecole Nationale Supérieure de Chimie de Montpellier where he worked on controlled radical polymerization in the lab of Prof. Bernard Boutevin. He obtained his Ph.D. in Polymer Science and Engineering from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst under the guidance of Prof. E. Bryan Coughlin working on hybrid organic/inorganic materials. In 2008, Yoan got an ETH Fellowship to work on two-dimensional polymers under the supervision of Prof. A. Dieter Schlüter at the Swiss Polytechnic Institute of Technology in Zürich and took on a position as junior Faculty (maître-assistant) in 2009 at the then newly founded Adolphe Merkle Institute (headed by Prof. Christoph Weder) at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland where he stayed for six year developing new research avenues in the field of optically and mechanically active polymeric materials.

In January 2016, Yoan joined the School of Polymer Science and Engineering (SPSE) at the University of Southern Mississippi as an Assistant Professor and rose to the rank of Associate Professor in 2021 prior to moving to ASU in January 2024.

Yoan’s research was recognized at several stages in his career being the recipient of a Leonardo Da Vinci Fellowship, two Massachusetts Space Grant Consortium Grant, an ETH Fellowship. In 2015, Yoan was the Hans and Marlies Zimmer International Scholar at the University of Cincinnati. Yoan served as the Southern Society for Coatings Technology Assistant Professor at USM and received an NSF CAREER award in 2020.