Getting to know Jeff Evans

Jeff Evans, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering technology, has been with the department since 2003. Prior to that he spent 20 years working in industry in the Chicago suburbs. He worked his way from hardware and software design to advanced development and system and software architecture. He started work on his Ph.D. in 2001 at the same time that the telecommunications “bubble” burst. He finished his doctorate and focused his job search on academia and research, and he landed at Purdue’s College of Technology.

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What he teaches: I teach primarily courses that are related to our computer engineering technology options: computer architecture, networking, and graduate courses in sensor networks, embedded systems security and high-performance computing systems. I’ve developed all of the courses I teach. They are offered in support of our core and correlate to a lot of my research. I’m also teaching the senior capstone class and coordinating the course sequence. That has been a new and enlightening experience. I oversee the entire class, looking at the course, its contents, and its implementation, and how it might evolve moving forward. We are considering the incorporation of more projects from industry or student research types of activities. I have had to be adaptable during my career, so encouraging students to be adaptable, coupled with the technical areas where I’ve chosen to do research, is what makes what we’re doing relevant. I try to bring the relevance back into the classroom.

[pullquote]I have had to be adaptable during my career, so encouraging students to be adaptable, coupled with the technical areas where I’ve chosen to do research, is what makes what we’re doing relevant. I try to bring the relevance back into the classroom.[/pullquote]On his research: Right now I’m focusing on performance and energy management of high-performance computing systems. I just came off of a year-long sabbatical where I immersed myself in trying to understand the cause and effects of performance and energy degradation in high performance computing systems and data centers. What are the kinds of things that force applications to run slower than they would normally? When they run slower, they are wasting more power for the same amount of work that they’re outputting. One of the other areas that we’re actively looking at correlates to sensor networks. It is sort of like remote-patient monitoring. I’m working with some people in Health and Kinesiology to identify contexts of physical activity.  They want to assess where people are doing physical activity. We are also interested in remote patient monitoring. We are working on how to process that information in useful ways and then getting that information to health care professionals for assessment and intervention. We’re also involved in modeling and simulation of small and large-scale systems, things like large computer networks down to things like nanomachining operations for mechanical type systems.

 

On his sabbatical: It was a great experience. I did a lot of publishing, from book chapters to journal articles and conferences. My work was for the Department of Energy through PC Krause and Associates, Inc. Paul Krause is a recently retired professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering in the electrical power and power electronics field. My sabbatical has definitely helped in my approach in the classroom. I'm able to bring outcomes from that work back into the classroom, especially in the computer architecture class that I’m teaching right now.

What he does in his free time: Generally, I enjoy golf and tennis. My wife and I own a Mazda Miata convertible and we get a great deal of enjoyment driving that around the country. It’s a great way to see certain parts of the country, like the national parks.

In another life: one thing that a lot of people wouldn’t know about me is that I was a professional musician. I am classically trained in flugelhorn, voice, piano, percussion, and trumpet, and I played just about everything from orchestral music to jazz to rock. I made one album in the ‘90s.