Distinguished Professor Steven Evans is serving the spring 2025 semester as a Research Professor in the Probability and Statistics of Discrete Structures program at the Simons Laufer Mathematical Sciences Institute (SLMath). Evans is also a Distinguished Professor in the Department of Mathematics and a Principal Investigator at the Center for Computational Biology. 

Formerly the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute (MSRI), the SLMath Institute is a world-renowned mathematical research institute located in the Berkeley Hills, just above campus. Each semester, SLMath hosts roughly 85 mathematicians and postdoctoral research fellows and holds programs and workshops that draw approximately 2,000 visits by mathematical scientists throughout the year. The institute was founded in 1982 by three Berkeley professors, Shiing-Shen Chern, Calvin Moore, and Isadore M. Singer, and has maintained close ties to UC Berkeley. 

“Professor Evans has been a pillar here in the Berkeley Statistics community since he arrived, and we are thrilled he can share his research and expertise with the other brilliant minds at SLMath,” said Chair Haiyan Huang.

Evans is a probabilist working in the theory of stochastic processes and their applications to areas including population genetics, biodemography (evolutionary explanations of aging and senescence), and population dynamics. He received his PhD from the Department of Pure Mathematics and Mathematical Statistics at the University of Cambridge. Evans joined the Department of Statistics in 1989 following a post-doctoral position at the University of Virginia, and he has held a joint appointment in Mathematics since 1999. He has been a Presidential Young Investigator and a Sloan Fellow. As well as being a member of the National Academy of Sciences, Evans is a Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics and the American Mathematical Society.

“I am extremely grateful that the Departments of Statistics and Mathematics are providing me with release time from teaching through a long-standing agreement between the Berkeley campus and SLMath," said Evans. "I am enjoying the unparalleled mathematical environment at the institute and working on two projects, one with Louigi Addario-Berry from Canada and Svante Janson from Sweden, and the other with Christina Goldschmidt from the UK and Shankar Bhamidi, a former UC Berkeley Statistics PhD student who is now a professor at the University of North Carolina.”

-Alex Coughlin