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PRINCETON UNIVERSITY
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Princeton, New Jersey 08544-5264Contact: Justin Harmon 609/258-5732
Date: November 10, 1998
Evans to Lead Princeton Materials Institute
PRINCETON, N.J. -- Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Anthony Evans will become director of the Princeton Materials Institute, effective immediately.
Evans joined the Princeton faculty on July 1 from Harvard, where he had been Gordon McKay Professor of Materials Engineering since 1994. Previously, he was Alcoa Professor and co-director of the High Performance Composites Center at the University of California at Santa Barbara. He originated Santa Barbara's Materials Department and served as its chair for six years.
"Through his career as a researcher and his experience building the leading materials program at Santa Barbara, Anthony Evans has shown that he has both the scientific background and the leadership qualities we want to inspire further achievement in our own materials effort," said Provost Jeremiah Ostriker.
Evans' research interests include the thermomechanical and structural behaviors of high-performance load-bearing materials and multifunctional systems, including composites, ceramics, alloys, ultralight metals and coatings. His research is useful in the design of lightweight and high-temperature systems for aerospace, power generation and automotive applications. Evans also studies multilayer materials for use in thermal management of power electronics, power generation and propulsion, as well as fundamentals of adhesion at the interfaces of different materials, including the behaviors of films, coatings and multilayers.
Author of over 400 publications in technical journals, Evans is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, chair of the Defense Sciences Research Council and a fellow of the American Ceramic Society. His research has won numerous honors, including the 1994 Griffith Medal and Prize of the UK Institute of Materials.
A native of Wales, Evans earned his B.Sc. (1964) and Ph.D. (1967) in metallurgy at Imperial College, London. He worked as a research project leader at AERE Harwell near Oxford and at the U.S. National Bureau of Standards in Gaithersburg, Md., before joining the Rockwell International Science Center in Thousand Oaks, Calif., as a group leader in structural ceramics and a principal scientist in structural materials in 1974. Four years later, he joined the University of California at Berkeley as a professor in the department of materials science and mineral engineering. He went to Santa Barbara as Alcoa Professor, co-director of the High Performance Composites Center, and first Materials Department chair in 1985.
Said Evans, "I believe that Princeton has the potential to become a trend-setter and a force leading materials research in new directions important to the vitality of the field."