Matthew Evans

Matthew Evans is an ecologist and these days his main interests lie in understanding the impacts of environmental change on the natural world, this involves a mixture of large-scale data collection and computer modelling. In Prof. Even s opinion it is the impacts of climate change that make it one of the 21^st century s most challenging problems. He considers himself lucky enough to have worked around the world, before coming to UAEU Prof. Evens was the Dean of Science for five years at the University of Hong Kong. Prior to that he was in London as head of the School of Biological and Chemical Sciences the largest school in Queen Mary University of London from 2011 to 2016. Prof. Evans was an undergraduate at Bristol University and received his PhD from the University of Cambridge. For his PhD research he worked on mate choice and sexual selection in a sunbird that is only found on the East African mountains.

Prof. Evans spent the first twenty years of his career working in behavioral ecology, conducting some of the first experiments that demonstrated that female birds select their mates on the basis of plumage signals like long tails and bright colours. After his PhD he worked at the University of Oxford as the Ornithology Demonstrator before his first permanent academic job at Stirling University in Scotland. After almost ten years at Stirling Prof. Evans moved to be the founding director of the Centre for Ecology and Conservation at the University of Exeter s Cornwall Campus. He conducted research in many countries around the world but especially in East and South Africa.