The basic explorations of structure property correlations and the variety of commercial and biological applications all attest to the fact that amphiphilic is highly useful. In this work, the monomer phenyl acrylamide was synthesized by reacting acrylamide with chloro benzene in the presence of pyridine. Two series of Poly (phenyl acrylamide-co-methyl methacrylate) (poly(PAAm-co-MMA)) hydrogels have been prepared, series 1 composed of PAAm/MMA copolymers covering a range of composition (60-90% PAAm) while series 2 composed of 90PAAm/10MMA copolymer containing 1, 2, 3, and 4 wt% of N,N'-methylenebisacrylamide (MBAA) as crosslinker. Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FT-IR) was used to characterize the resulting monomer and polymers. The effects of the monomer ratio and added crosslinker on the swelling behavior and mechanical properties of poly (PAAm-co-MMA) hydrogels were investigated. Swelling parameters such as water content (EWC), volume fraction of polymer (φ2) and weight loss during swelling were determined. Depending on Young's and shear modulus (E and G), network parameters such as molecular mass between cross-links (Mc), cross-link density (ve) and polymer-solvent interaction (χ) were calculated. The ability of series 1 hydrogels for use in controlled release of drugs such as ciprofloxacin was also studied. Results demonstrated that most of the drug load is released during the first 10 hours.