William J. Evans
Director, Eddleman Quantum Institute
Bill Evans is a UC Irvine Distinguished Professor in the Department of Chemistry at the University of California, Irvine. After he received his B.S. degree from the University of Wisconsin and a Ph.D. from UCLA, he did postdoctoral research at Cornell University. When he began his independent career 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, even though these elements were thought to be uninteresting at that time. His central thesis, that the special properties of these metals should lead to unique chemistry if the appropriate molecules could be synthesized, worked out much better than he ever imagined! 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 UC Irvine include the discovery of molecular species containing nine new rare-earth and actinide oxidation states. Some of these have promise as molecular qubits. Evans has published over 550 papers and 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, a Special Creativity Extension Award from the National Science Foundation, the UC Irvine Distinguished Faculty Award for Research, the UC Irvine Physical Sciences Outstanding Contributions to Undergraduate Education Award, the Lauds and Laurels Outstanding Faculty Achievement Award, and the UC Irvine Daniel G. Aldrich, Jr. Distinguished University Service Award. He started working with Roy Eddleman in 2017 to create the Eddleman Quantum Institute and was named Director when it was established in 2020.