From humble beginnings in Marly to the new building on campus, Prof. Yoan Simon (University of Southern Mississippi) will briefly retrace some of the early days and journey of the Adolphe Merkle Institute through his own perspective. He will then explain how his time at AMI shaped many of the directions that continue to be pursued in his own research group, covering some of the work from that period, and how it enabled new endeavors in his research. He will cover topics such as light upconversion in a variety of matrices and move on to aqueous self-assembly of block copolymers and network structures. Specifically, Prof. Simon will focus on unravelling the governing principles of associative dynamic exchanges by modulating the chemistry of uncatalyzed exchanges in diketoenamines and diketoxime structures by utilizing orthogonal thiol-ene photopolymerization. Specifically, he will broach the topics of chemical exchange and chain dynamics and their overall impact on the rheological properties of the materials.He will also discuss counterintuitive behavior that his group discovered in the photopolymerization of thiol-ene networks in the presence and absence of solvent, wherein solvent-cured systems repeatedly exhibited both a higher glass transition temperature (Tg) and a lower elastic modulus above said Tg. These results could have huge impacts on the transport properties, the reprocessability and the performance of such systems, and be used as an additional handle to tune materials properties.