Prior to founding Karios Scientific Inc. with Mary M. Yang, Youvan was an Associate Professor of Chemistry at MIT, and his Ph.D. degree in biophysics was from UC Berkeley. Extensive litigation over Youvan's KCAT patent for solid phase enzyme kinetics screening in microcolonies set case law in the California Supreme Court. Concurrently, Youvan was funded by the NIH through the Phase II SBIR program on microbial identification, and after the September 11, 2001 attacks he became an advisor to agencies involved in homeland defense, having published his first scientific research paper on heat-resistant microbial endospores in 1975. Youvan received an Associate's degree in Electronics and a Bachelor's degree in Biology at ages 15 and 19, respectively, from Pittsburg State University.

In his 1981 Ph.D. thesis, Youvan found inhibitors (hypermodified nucleosides) of retroviral reverse transcriptase present in ribosomal RNA.

In a 1984 publication with John E. Hearst, and in collaboration with Barry L. Marrs, Youvan published the nucleotide and deduced protein sequence for the photosynthetic reaction center - the proteins that convert light to chemical energy in photosynthetic organisms. This work correctly predicted the secondary structure of the 11 transmembrane helices of the reaction center as confirmed by X-ray crystallography. Later collaborative work with ultra-fast laser laboratories helped yield evidence for a vibrational coherence in the sub-picosecond processes of photosynthetic charge separation . International collaborative work was funded by a Human Frontier Science Program Award .

Youvan and his students have also worked in the field of combinatorial mutagenesis which can be used for directed evolution of proteins , such as enzymes. At MIT, they discovered a pattern in the genetic code that is correlated with amino acid residue hydropathy and molar volume, see Degeneracy of the genetic code. This observation can be compared with Frances Crick's declaration of the genetic code as being a frozen accident .

Youvan is also an inventor in the fields of digital imaging spectroscopy for absorption spectra and fluorescence, including Fluorescence Resonance Energy Transfer (FRET) . As of 2010, his work is referenced by over 800 US patents and patent applications.

Youvan is a signator of Dissent from Darwin and currently heads a foundation studying pure and applied mathematics. Work in mathematics includes a method for visualizing tuples and a method for rapidly determining the pseudoinverse of a certain class of over-determined matrices.