David Evans

David Silas Evans of Boulder, Colorado passed away peacefully at his home on Friday, October 14, 2016, surrounded by family. He was 80. Dave was born in Madison, Wisconsin, the oldest of four children, and grew up in Milwaukee. Highly curious from the outset, he'd sometimes skip school and take the bus to Chicago to visit the Museum of Science and Industry. In the summer of 1951, just after turning 15, he took a freighter to Liverpool and spent several weeks bicycling alone across England, and then across Europe as far as Germany, often camping in barns along the way. He graduated from Riverside High School in Milwaukee in 1954. Dave attended the University of Michigan, where he met Susan, his lab partner who would later become his wife, and received a Bachelor of Science degree in Physics in 1958. He received a PhD in Physics from UC Berkeley in 1962. As part of his thesis work, he spent an Austral summer (about 100 days) on Macquarie Island, midway between Australia and Antarctica, performing measurements simultaneous with similar observations made in Alaska at the other end of the geomagnetic field line. This was one of the first investigations into geophysical phenomena at magnetically conjugate locations. Dave received a fellowship at Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. While there, he developed an "open windowed electron multiplier" into a detector of very low energy particles, a design that continues to be used to this day. He used this detector in instruments flown onboard sounding rockets launched from Canada to perform the earliest measurements of the low energy electron precipitation into the atmosphere that produces aurora borealis. In 1970, Dave took a position with NOAA's Space Environment Laboratory in Boulder, Colorado. He continued his research into high latitude geophysical phenomena using instruments onboard polar orbiting weather satellites and on sounding rockets launched from Alaska, Canada, and Scandinavia. Dave authored or co-authored more than 100 research papers. A paper he authored in 1974 explaining the energy distribution of precipitating electrons that produce aurora was highly referenced and was chosen as one of the most significant papers from the first 50 years (1954-2004) of NOAA's Boulder Laboratories. He won, together with Larry Lyons, the Environmental Research Laboratories "Outstanding Scientific Paper" award in 1978. Dave worked at the Space Physics Division at NASA in Washington, D.C. from 1989-1991, where he helped organize a peer review process for submitted research proposals and conducted those reviews. He returned periodically to review research proposals through early 1993. In 1998, NASA again requested he be reassigned from NOAA to NASA for two years to manage a portion of the space physics research program. He was highlighted in a New York Times article in 2000 titled "Earth, Wind, and Fireworks" about auroral activity. After returning to NOAA, Dave developed a suite of presentations of observations obtained from the charged particle instruments onboard NOAA's polar orbiting weather satellites. They were posted online and updated as data arrived. They proved exceptionally useful and popular. He continued to work with data from those satellites until his retirement in 2003. Even in retirement, Dave continued to serve on various NASA proposal review panels and on the MAVEN mission Standing Review Board. Dave traveled extensively. He made many trips to the Churchill, Manitoba rocket range and to Poker Flat Research Range in Alaska, where he was involved in instrumenting and launching rockets over the aurora. In 1971, he spent 80 hours on a train from Moscow to Irkutsk, Siberia to attend a meeting. He visited England, Norway, France, and Russia more than two dozen times for meetings, including a visit with Susan to Stockholm in 1989, where they attended the Swedish Crafoord Prize award presentation and, along with a few hundred others, had dinner with the King and Queen of Sweden. He also visited Japan that year. Twice he drove his large family through Central America in a VW bus. He was a member of the American Geophysical Union, Sigma Xi, and the International Association of Geomagnetism and Aeronomy. Despite all of his academic and career accomplishments, Dave considered his children to be his greatest achievement. Dave loved the Green Bay Packers, Judy Collins songs, a good joke, and reading. In keeping with his interest in airplanes, he enjoyed constructing intricate balsa wood models of WWII planes. He loved riding his motorcycle along back mountain roads, Sunday drives with his family, and XXX beer and Sudoku at Southern Sun Pub & Brewery in Table Mesa, where among employees he was affectionately known as Doctor X. Dave will be greatly missed by family and friends, both local and around the globe. He is survived by Susan, his wife of 57 years; his children Kathleen (Dariusz) of Missoula, MT, Diane (John) of Seattle, WA, Jennifer of Longmont, CO, Kenneth of Boulder, Keith of Boulder, Margaret Kelly of Fort Collins, Eulalia of Boulder, and Linda (Troy) of Highlands Ranch, CO; 15 grandchildren, 5 great-grandchildren, sisters Mary Pharis and Patricia Evans, and brother William Evans. He was predeceased by daughters Aracely and Rebecca. A Celebration of Life will be held Friday, October 28, 2016 at 2 pm at Unity of Boulder Church, 2855 Folsom St., Boulder. In lieu of flowers, donations to TRU Community Care (www.trucare.org) or to the University of California at Berkeley Foundation (https://give.berkeley.edu) would be greatly appreciated.