Evan earned his PhD in Biological Anthropology from Southern Illinois University Carbondale where he focused on spatial patterns of skeletal and dental variation in two large necropoles of Iron Age Central Italy (1st millennium BCE). He helped develop the D-Lab R and Python FUN!damentals introductory workshop trainings and the Introduction to Machine Learning and Deep Learning workshops in R, founded the Machine Learning Working Group in Fall 2016, and teaches DIGHUM101 (Practicing the Digital Humanities) for the DH Summer Minor and Certificate Program.
He always advocates for the beginner and prides himself on helping anthropologists, social and biological scientists, and humanists get onboarded with computational tools for their research. In an effort to "practice what he teaches", he has published original research in Dental Anthropology, Medical Mycology, The Bioarchaeology of Frontiers and Borderlands, Electronic Literature [Frame]works for the Creative Digital Humanities, and bioRxiv in addition to other machine learning and computational text analysis topics using the same techniques taught in his workshops and developed for online courses.
