Yoan was born in the beautiful city of Montpellier, France where he spent most of his youth enjoying the pleasures of the Southern French living. Tucked between sandy beaches and vineyards, only a few hours from the Alps and the Pyrenees, Montpellier was a hard place to leave so Yoan decided to stay there for his undergraduate studies. Yoan holds a Bachelor’s and Master’s degree from the Ecole Nationale Supérieure de Chimie de Montpellier. His first contact with research was in the labs of Prof. Bernard Boutevin where he learned about controlled radical polymerization. He then moved the “Great White North” and started a 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 then moved back to Europe to the snowy land of Switzerland where he 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. After a year, he took on a position as junior Faculty (maître-assistant) 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 was rose to the rank of Associate Professor in 2021. Since January 2024, Yoan moved further west and is now 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’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 currently serves as the Southern Society for Coatings Technology Assistant Professor in SPSE and received an NSF CAREER award in 2020.

In his spare time, Yoan is an avid football (the real one) and team sport enthusiast, a Judo convert and Yoan is also an epicurean who enjoys cooking (and eating) good meals but above all, Yoan enjoys spending time with his family.

School of Molecular Sciences and Biodesign Center for Sustainable Macromolecular Materials and Manufacturing

Arizona State University

797 E Tyler St

Biodesign Institute C

Tempe, AZ 85281

USA

Office: C289

E-Mail: yoan.simon@asu.edu

Phone: + 1 601 266 4648

Twitter: @YoanCSimon