David Evans (Yale professor)

Using paleomagnetism of rocks from South Africa, Australia, Canada, Brazil, Russia and China, Evans has worked to reassemble the configuration of supercontinents that preceded Pangea. He was a member of drilling projects of the Kaapvaal craton with the Agouron institute for geobiology, and a member of the scientific team to develop a large igneous province global "barcode" record of plume magmatism on Earth. He has also contributed primary data demonstrating that ancient ice ages had continental ice sheets reaching tropical latitudes, which has been incorporated into the Snowball Earth theory of the planet's long term paleoclimate. Evans is involved with the latest efforts at reconstructing the history of supercontinents on Earth through the last three billion years. He is the Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Department of Geology and Geophysics at Yale University; and the current coordinator of field student expeditions to locations including Norway, Queensland, Australia, British Columbia, Canada, New Zealand, and South Africa, as well as undergraduate excursions to Sicily and Barbados. He has spent sabbatical leaves in Taiwan and Australia, where he studied modern and ancient mountain building processes. Evans is a 2002 honoree of the Packard Fellowship in Science and Engineering, and a finalist for the Blavatnik Awards for young scientists.

Evans musical interests include Bela Fleck and Victor Wooten, Ludwig van Beethoven, Public Enemy, and Claude Debussy. At Yale, he has performed with the Berkeley College Orchestra as a bassist, both as an undergraduate student and a professor. He is known to colleagues and students as 'Majestic D,' his alter ego who infuses hip hop culture with educational geology themes. He is fluent in German and proficient in Chinese.