Yves Bréchet (French: [bʁeʃɛ]) (born October 12, 1961) is a physicist, specialist of materials science, former High Commissioner for Atomic Energy of France, current Scientific Director of Saint Gobain, professor (part-time) at Monash University, and a member of the French Academy of Sciences.

Yves Bréchet graduated from École Polytechnique (1981), École des hautes études en sciences sociales (1992) and obtained his doctoral degree and habilitation from Joseph Fourier University in 1987 and 1992, respectively.

[1] He has been a member of the international scientific council of ArcelorMittal and the Commissariat à l'énergie atomique, and a scientific advisor to Rio Tinto Alcan, EDF and ONERA, as well as several editing boards of scientific journals On 19 September 2012 he was named to the position of High Commissioner for Atomic Energy and Alternative Energies by the President of the French Republic, succeeding Catherine Cesarsky.

Since 2018 he has been giving a course on "Scientific analysis for political decisions" at the Ecole Nationale d'Administration.

His activities have spanned the fields of physical metallurgy, thermodynamics, microstructures, phase transformations, plasticity, fracture micromechanics, material selection, structural materials design, biointerfaces, structural biomimetics.