Youmna Mouhamad is from Mayotte, which is French overseas department, located in the Indian ocean between Madagascar and Mozambique. It looks lovely, and we all want to go there. The beauty of Mayotte is unhindered by higher education, so she started her degree studies in Marseille (which is considerably less glamourous), but armed with very little English she decided to go to Leeds to study as an ERASMUS student, which seemed to go on far too long and so she ended up with a degree in physics from there. Youmna started in November 2009 to work on film formation in polymer mixtures. These are model polymer mixtures of polystyrene and poly(methyl methacrylate) and was done in collaboration with Nigel Clarke of the Department of Physics and Astronomy in Sheffield, although when this work started, Nigel was in Durham. She is here photographed in San Francisco, during the MRS meeting where she gave an oral presentation. On Monday July 16, 2014, Youmna defended her thesis before her examiners, Professors Steve Yeates (University of Manchester) and Patrick Fairclough (University of Sheffield). Whilst busy writing up her corrections to her thesis and starting on her second paper, she started postdoctoral work at Swansea University. And her papers have been published, which is always good. Youmna has now since Swansea University to take up a Royal Academy of Engineering Enterprise Fellowship at the University of South Wales, which is a measure of her extraordinary talent. Her talent is further exemplified by her winning one of the top 50 women in Engineering awards from the Women's Engineering Society in 2022!
Interview with Youmna on BBC Africa about her new directions (in French)
The Top 50 Women in Engineering 2022
Publications
Y. Mouhamad, P. Mokarian-Tabari, R. A. L. Jones, and M. Geoghegan "Application of mean-field theory to the spin casting of polystyrene and poly(methyl methacrylate) blend films from toluene" Polymer 178 121578 (2019)
J. A. Baker, Y. Mouhamad, K. E. A. Hooper, D. Burkitt, M. Geoghegan, and T. M. Watson "From spin coating to roll-to-roll: investigating the challenge of upscaling lead halide perovskite solar cells" IET Renew. Power Gen. 11 546-9 (2017)
Y. Mouhamad, P. Mokarian-Tabari, N. Clarke, R. A. L. Jones, and M. Geoghegan "Dynamics of polymer film formation during spin coating" J. Appl. Phys. 116 123513 (2014)
Oral presentations
UK Plastic Electronics Research Conference, Loughborough, December 2013.
Materials Research Society Spring meeting, San Francisco, USA, April 2012.
American Physical Society March meeting, Boston, USA, February 2012.