Katherine J. Evans is the Division Director for the Computational Sciences and Engineering Division at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL). She holds a joint associate professorship with the University of Tennessee’s Interdisciplinary Bredesen Center and serves on the leadership team for ORNL’s Climate Change Science Institute. She serves as the ORNL point of contact for the ASCR Advanced Computing Technologies section and is the outgoing chair for the SIAM activity group on Mathematics of the Planet Earth.  Evans is also an active researcher in the areas of Earth system model (ESM) evaluation, developing and implementing scalable numerical algorithms to improve the efficiency and accuracy for multi-scale configurations of ESM, and analysis of large-scale persistent weather patterns in global atmospheric models. As part of her numerical methods research with ESM, she also makes connections to other applications, including ice sheets, more general fluid flow, disease propagation, and oncology.

Evans earned her PhD in Earth and Atmospheric Sciences with an emphasis in math from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 2000, where she was awarded the William Rhodes fellowship and the senior Dean’s fellowship for most outstanding senior PhD student. She joined ORNL in 2007 after a stint as a post-doctoral researcher and staff member at Los Alamos National Laboratory in the Decision Applications and Theoretical Divisions. She led the Computational Earth Sciences group at ORNL for 6 years before her current role. She is a member of the American Meteorological Society, American Geophysical Union, and the Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematicians.