William J. Evans (chemist)

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William J. Evans is a Distinguished Professor at the University of California, Irvine, who specializes in the inorganic and organometallic chemistry of heavy metals, specifically the rare earth metals (i.e. Sc, Y, and the lanthanides), actinides, and bismuth. He has published over 500 peer-reviewed research papers on these topics.

Evans was born in Madison, Wisconsin, and raised in Menomonee Falls, Wisconsin. He received a Bachelor of Science degree at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1969 where he did undergraduate research on pentaborane chemistry with Professor Donald F. Gaines. Subsequently, he attended the University of California, Los Angeles, where he obtained his PhD degree in 1973. His PhD research on the synthesis of metallocarboranes was supervised by Professor M. Frederick Hawthorne. He did postdoctoral research at Cornell University on the synthesis of transition metal phosphite complexes under the direction of Professor Earl L. Muetterties.

Evans began his independent research career in 1975 at the University of Chicago. He chose an area of research completely different from his training and experience, namely the chemistry of the rare-earth metals and actinides, with the central thesis that the special properties of these metals should lead to unique chemistry. He used exploratory synthesis to generate the new molecular species with the appropriate coordination environments to allow the special chemistry of these metals to be accessed. After receiving tenure at Chicago in 1982, he was recruited to the University of California, Irvine, where he has been a Professor since 1983. Among his recent accomplishments at UCI is the discovery of molecular species containing nine new rare earth and actinide oxidation states.

Evans is one of the few people to have received the American Chemical Society (ACS) Awards in both Inorganic Chemistry and Organometallic Chemistry. He has also received the Sir Edward Franklin Award and the Centenary Prize of the Royal Society of Chemistry, the Frank Spedding Award for Excellence in the Science and Technology of Rare Earths, the Terrae Rarae Award of the Tage der Seltenen Erden Society in Germany, the Richard C. Tolman Award of the Southern California Section of the ACS,^[1] a Special Creativity Extension Award from the National Science Foundation, the UCI Distinguished Faculty Award for Research, and the UCI Physical Sciences Outstanding Contributions to Undergraduate Education Award. He was also honored with UCI's highest faculty award, the Lauds and Laurels Outstanding Faculty Achievement Award. Recently, he was named Director of the Eddleman Quantum Institute at UCI and has been active in promoting interdisciplinary quantum science.