RONALD M. EVANS, Ph.D.
Career Highlights

Born: April 17, 1949, in East Los Angeles

Growing up nerdy: “I wasn't super nerdy,” says Evans. “But I was definitely nerdy for my environment—East L.A.” Did he have to keep up on celebrity gossip in order to fit in? “Nah, I'm a guy. I just had to be able to talk about baseball.”

EDUCATION
Undergraduate degree: B.A., Bacteriology, University of California, Los Angeles
Graduate degree: Ph.D., Microbiology, University of California, Los Angeles

POSTGRADUATE TRAINING
1975–1978: Postdoctoral fellow, The Rockefeller University, New York

Show me the paper: Evans did his postdoctoral fellowship in the lab of James Darnell, who, Evans says, “has no tolerance for sloppy thinking.” All assertions had to be backed up by information from the literature. But Darnell, who read and remembered everything, wouldn't let it go at that. “He'd go to the shelf, grab a huge journal volume, and open right to the page,” Evans says. The intellectual exercise kept Evans on his toes. “It did sharpen my skills a lot.”

KEY APPOINTMENTS
1978, 1983, 1986: Assistant Professor, Associate Professor, Professor, The Salk Institute
1985, 1989, 1995: Adjunct Professor in Biology, Biomedical Sciences, Neuroscience, University of California, San Diego
1985: HHMI Investigator, The Salk Institute
1998: March of Dimes Chair in Molecular and Developmental Neurobiology, The Salk Institute

Love in the lab: Evans met his wife, Ellen Potter, during a late night at the lab bench. “I was a new faculty member. She was a technician working with a collaborator. We were both working long hours … and we just clicked.”

SELECTED HONORS, AWARDS, AND FELLOWSHIPS
Member, Institute of Medicine
Fellow, American Academy of Arts and Sciences
Member, The Harvey Society
Member, National Academy of Sciences
California Scientist of the Year, California Museum of Science and Industry and the California Museum Foundation, 1994
Bristol-Myers Squibb Award for Distinguished Achievement in Metabolic Research, 2000
Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award, 2004

SELECTED PROFESSIONAL ACTIVITIES
Editorial board, Cell Metabolism, Cell, Genes and Development, Cell Press, Cold Spring Harbor Press
Founder and Chair, Scientific Advisory Board, Ligand Pharmaceuticals
Scientific Advisory Board, Osaka Bioscience Institute
Scientific Advisory Board, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute
External Scientific Advisory Board, Massachusetts General Hospital

PUBLICATIONS
More than 250 original research articles in peer-reviewed journals such as Nature, Science, Cell, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Nature Medicine, Molecular Cell, and Genes and Development. Numerous review articles and book chapters.

Integration hesitation: Evans's work on the cellular receptors that regulate metabolism spans many disciplines, from basic molecular biology to physiology, endocrinology, and evolution. To integrate all this information, he's had to read dozens of textbooks. “It would be great to put all this together in one big book,” says Evans. “Is it doable? Yes. Have I thought about doing it? Yes. Have I acted on it? No. It would be an enormous undertaking. And in the end, a book like that is a retrospective of what is known. I'm much more interested in what we don't know—what's over the horizon.”

OUTSIDE THE LAB
The La Jolla 500: “I like fast cars,” says Evans. “I like the feel of driving fast.” He even took a turn at the Porsche driving school, spending three days learning how to drive Formula One cars—“ultrafast,” he says.

3-D doodling: Strewn about Evans's office are scores of unusual sculptures: credit cards cut up and bent into animal shapes, and used Post-it notes rolled into tight little spires and arranged decoratively inside handmade ceramic mugs or stabilized by binder clips from which they sprout like bits of bamboo. “I don't have a good explanation for the pathology behind this behavior,” says Evans of his designs. “I just like doing it.”

Closet Googler: “I enjoy Googling,” says Evans. “You get caught up going down these weird paths. It's fun. I probably should be reading the 100 most important books in the world instead. But what can I say?”

10/04

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