Christopher J. Evans

As the head of the European Space Agency (ESA) office at the institute, Dr. Chris Evans oversees all ESA personnel who support the Hubble Space Telescope and the James Webb Space Telescope. He is also responsible for Hubble and Webb outreach efforts in Europe, which include the dissemination of the results from both observatories and communications with the public. Additionally, he serves as the ESA project scientist for Hubble and Webb guest observers.

Before joining the institute, Dr. Evans served as the head of science at the UK Astronomy Technology Centre (UK ATC) based at the Royal Observatory in Edinburgh, Scotland. In this role, he led the Project Science Group, developed new projects of strategic interest, and served as the principal investigator of the UK Extremely Large Telescope (ELT) Instrument Programme, which supports the UK’s roles in several ELT instruments. He also served as the project scientist and UK principal investigator for the Cassegrain U-Band Efficient Spectrograph (CUBES)
, a near-ultraviolet spectrograph for the Very Large Telescope (VLT).

He first joined the UK ATC in 2005 as a project scientist, and served as a senior project scientist from 2011 to 2015. In 2008, he launched the VLT-FLAMES Tarantula Survey, an ambitious multi-epoch spectroscopic survey of massive stars in the 30 Doradus star-forming region. One of the early results from this was the discovery of a massive runaway star
from observations with Hubble’s Cosmic Origins Spectrograph.

Earlier in his career, he was a postdoctoral researcher at the Isaac Newton Group of Telescopes on La Palma, Spain. From 2002 to 2005, he took a leading role in the VLT-FLAMES Survey of Massive Stars, a large international collaboration to quantify the effects of metallicity on massive-star evolution. He continued this line of research while he worked at UK ATC.

Dr. Evans is an active researcher and a member of SPIE, the international society for optics and photonics. He has served as a program committee member for SPIE’s biennial ground-based and airborne instrumentation conferences since 2010, and has served as chair for the past four meetings. He has also served as chair of a 2021 near-ultraviolet spectroscopy workshop, and a 2017 conference about spectroscopic surveys with the ELT. He has mentored PhD students since 2008.