[citation needed] Youvan was an associate professor of chemistry at MIT,[citation needed] where he specialized in the study of photosynthesis, specifically the spectral analysis of photosynthetic bacteria.

Youvan, along with Mary M. Yang, developed instrumentation to study the spectra of bacteria directly from a petri dish.

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

[1][2] His work correctly predicted the secondary structure of the 11 transmembrane helices of the reaction center as confirmed by X-ray crystallography.

In 1987 Youvan and E. Bylina constructed the first site-directed mutants of bacterial reaction centers.