John Evans, ScD

John Evans is an Adjunct Professor on Environmental Science at the Harvard School of Public Health. Dr. Evans' research focuses on risk assessment, uncertainty analysis, and decision making in environmental health. Much of Dr. Evans' work has involved the development and application of methods for characterizing uncertainty in estimates of exposures to and risks from contaminants in the environment. Simple and transparent approaches for estimating population exposure to air pollutants are necessary to support many risk assessments – especially in developing countries. Dr. Evans has pioneered application of the concept of intake fraction (formerly known as exposure efficiency) to meet this need. Environmental decision makers often need to distinguish situations when they have enough information to make control decisions and from those in which it would be best to wait for research to improve the scientific basis for decision making. Dr. Evans has demonstrated how the decision analytic approach for estimating the value of information can be used to address this issue in support of environmental decisions.

Dr. Evans received his ScD and SM in environmental health sciences from Harvard, and his SM in water resources management and BSE in industrial engineering from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor.