| Citation | Professor Robert Evans is distinguished for his major contributions to the statistical mechanics of liquids and surfaces. He is widely recognised both nationally and internationally as one of the leading statistical mechanicians of his generation. His early work on the electronic transport properties of liquid metals led to important new results, particularly for liquid transition metals, long regarded as somewhat mysterious. He developed and expanded analytical theories for ionic systems (molten salts and liquid semiconductors) and this work, in which he always kept close contact with experiment, established him as a theorist of exceptional talent. In the late 70s and early 80s, Evans switched his attention to liquids at interfaces and surfaces. He was the first to understand the connections between apparently competing theories of interfacial properties and his seminal 1979 paper on this subject is still the most widely cited paper on classical density functional theory of inhomogeneous fluids. Later he developed new density functional theories for adsorption and wetting phenomena at solid fluid and liquid liquid interfaces and then pioneered these techniques in the study of the structure and phase equilibria of fluids in confining geometries and in porous media. In 1990 he predicted the interface localisation transition for fluids confined between substrates which exert competing fields. Recently he developed powerful analytic methods to probe the asymptotic form of the correlation functions for bulk liquids and mixtures and their surfaces. The methodology, developed by Evans, transcends previous work on the subject and makes significant predictions for classes of structural behaviour in a wide variety of liquids. |