Professor Evans received his B.S. in Physics from Harvey Mudd College in 1996 and his Ph.D. from California Institute of Technology in 2002. He continued his work on LIGO, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, in his post-doctoral years at Caltech, then moved to the European Gravitational Observatory to work on the Virgo project. In 2007 he took a position at Massachusetts Institute of Technology as a research scientist working on the Advanced LIGO project, where he helped design and build the Advanced LIGO interferometer.

Prof. Evans moved to his current position at MIT in January 2013, at which point his research group began work on new technologies to improved Advanced LIGO sensitivity. In 2014 Prof. Evans was elected as chair-person of the Advanced Interferometer Configurations Working Group, where he is in charge of providing coherent design targets for future gravitational wave detectors. These design targets serve to give direction to instrument R&D in the LIGO Scientific Collaboration, and provide the foundation for the next generation of gravitational wave detectors. Prof. Evans was promoted to Associate Professor of Physics with tenure in 2018. He was awarded the 2019 New Horizons in Physics Prize "for research on present and future ground-based detectors of gravitational waves."