Gary W. Evans

Gary W. Evans

Fellow: Awarded 2013
Field of Study: Psychology

Competition: US & Canada

Cornell University

Gary W. Evans  is the Elizabeth Lee Vincent Professor of Human Ecology, Cornell University. He is a developmental and environmental psychologist interested in how the physical environment affects children’s development.  Much of his work over the past two decades has focused on the environment of childhood poverty, examining how the accumulation of psychosocial and physical risk factor exposures among children influences their development.  After attending Colgate University for two years, he dropped out of college to work for VISTA as a community organizer placed in a Community Action Program in Lansing, Michigan. He returned to Colgate, graduating in 1971, and then received an M.S. and a Ph.D. in Psychology from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst (1971–1975).  For two of those years, he also worked full time for the Commonwealth of Massachusett’s Institute for the Environment, one of the first interdisciplinary, university-government think tanks in the nation devoted to environmental issues.  He has done postdoctoral work in psychoneuroendocrinology at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm and on human development at Cornell University with support from a Senior National Research Service Award from the National Institute of Child Health and Development. From 1975 to 1992 he was on the faculty in the School of Social Ecology, University of California, Irvine, before moving to his present position at Cornell University.  Evans has had continuous extramural funding for his research beginning with an NSF Dissertation Fellowship and has received numerous teaching awards throughout his career. He was a member of the John D. and Catherine T. Mac Arthur Foundation Network on Socioeconomic Status and Health and in 2006 received an Honorary Doctorate from Stockholm University.  He currently serves on the Board on Children, Youth, and Families of the National Academy of Sciences and the Institute of Medicine.

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