Katherine J Evans
Director, Office of Institutional Strategic Planning
Bio
Katherine J. Evans, Director, Office of Institutional Strategic Planning (OISP) at Oak Ridge National Laboratory
Evans coordinates strategic planning and execution for Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), which involves identifying, advancing, and resourcing lab-wide science and technology (S&T) strategic activities, assisting with directorate level strategic plans as needed, developing and delivering S&T metrics to track ORNL impact, and leading S&T information management, research library, and LDRD and ICE programs within OISP. Prior to her current role, she served as director of ORNL's Computational Sciences and Engineering Division, which covers scalable computing to address large scientific challenges across the physical, engineering, health, and quantum information sciences. Evans is also an active researcher in the areas of Earth system model development and evaluation with a focus on implementing scalable numerical algorithms and analysis of large-scale persistent weather patterns in global atmospheric models. She applies insights from these models 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 post-doctoral research appointment and staff member position at Los Alamos National Laboratory in the Decision Applications and Theoretical Divisions. She serves as a member of the Scientific Advisory Committee for the Met Office, the Scientific Advisory Board for Platforms for Advanced Scientific Computing, and has presented a number of keynote and public talks for international conferences. She is a member of the American Meteorological Society, American Geophysical Union, and the Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematicians, where she received the 2024 prize for the Mathematics of the Planet Earth activity group.