Presenter

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 and the leadership council for the UT Chattanooga SimCenter. She serves as the representative for the DOE’s Biological and Environmental Research program on the coordination committee of the DOE Scientific Discovery through Advanced Computing (SciDAC) program. 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 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. She joined ORNL in 2007 after post-doctoral and staff positions at Los Alamos National Laboratory. She led the Computational Earth Sciences group at ORNL for 6 years before her current role.