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Matthew Evans joined Queen’s as Provost and Vice-Principal (Academic) in August 2023. In this role, he is the university’s chief academic, budget, and operating officer – overseeing academic affairs, developing the operating budget, and delivering on the university’s strategic priorities. Prior to arriving at Queen’s, he held senior leadership positions at several universities around the world, including in Scotland, England, Hong Kong, and the United Arab Emirates. He’s an accomplished ecologist, biologist, and climate change scientist, and in 2020, he was recognized on a global list of the top 2 per cent of scientists in his field in the world. In this interview, Dr. Evans shares his experiences as a researcher, professor, and university leader, and insight into why he came to Queen’s, and his priorities.

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You are a Professor of Ecology with research interests spanning ecology, evolutionary biology, conservation biology, behavioural ecology, and most recently, how to predict the impact of climate change on the natural world. How did you decide to enter these fields and what continually fuels your interest and research pursuits?

It’s evolved over time. My initial academic interest stemmed from my love of ornithology as a child. That’s been a personal, private passion of mine. I’ve always had a pair of binoculars on the table and bird books all over the house. I never lost that, and I did a first degree in zoology at Bristol and became increasingly interested in what was then a new field, behavioural ecology – why animals do what they do, why they look the way they look, etc. It was linked very tightly to evolutionary biology. Later I went on an expedition to Mount Kenya with a friend of mine and I became fascinated with a bird that lives in the alpine zones of the country – the scarlet tufted malachite sunbird. I managed to convince the University of Cambridge to give me a scholarship to study these birds for my PhD. It was a fantastic three years.

I continued to work in behavioural ecology for most of my career, narrowing it down to sexual selection, how female birds decide on their mates. One of the biggest projects I worked on was on swallows, much the same species as we see here in Canada but in Europe. I studied the interplay of their aerials, aerodynamics, and their overall behaviour.

At a certain point, it started to get harder to do field work, for various reasons, and I also began to take on administrative work. I decided to change tack and started the climate change work. I was driven by this massively important question of what the impacts of climate change will mean and what will happen. That’s the fundamental question. Even small changes in precipitation and temperature have huge impacts on ecosystems. We can see that now all around us. What this group of us did, instead of waiting around for what might happen, we wanted to predict what might happen and then we would have some idea of where we were heading and we could work to put in strategies to mitigate this. We have produced very large computer models of ecosystems and how they work, and that’s where we are today, trying to make these predictions and share this information with governments and those responsible for managing estates and pieces of land, such as environmental trusts.

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You’ve held several leadership positions at universities around the world, including in Scotland, England, Hong Kong, and the United Arab Emirates. What drew you to Canada and to Queen’s?

I want to be in places where I can feel that I can make a difference. Maintaining the status quo isn’t a particularly challenging thing to do, and I was convinced that there was a desire to do things differently here. I was convinced of this by the emphasis on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) – that was something that very clearly mapped onto my own personal values and research. The idea of targeting a university to address those goals is a very attractive one. Queen’s is also a very good, U15 university and the Canadian system is very strong. All of those things make it an attractive place to be.

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What are your first impressions of Queen’s and the community?

From the few events I’ve been to, I can see that there are hugely motivated people studying here, students who have already achieved so much; they are all very accomplished. It’s a great asset to have students of that caliber, and it’s incredibly impressive.

The challenging thing, and something that is new to me these days, is the dynamic between the university and the city. The universities I’ve been in have all been in very big cities – Hong Kong, Al Ain (UAE), London. Kingston is a small town, and we have approximately 30,000 students – that’s a challenging student body size to be absorbed into a relatively small place, and the potential for town-gown conflict is greater. In London, you can drop 50,000 students into the city and they will vanish; the same is true in Hong Kong. We have to do more work here looking after the relationship with the city than perhaps you do in a big city.

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Over the past months, Queen’s current budget situation has been top of mind for many at the university. What are your priorities over the next few months, and looking ahead to the next few years?

The budget issue is the main issue and it has to be solved. The level of government investment in the post-secondary sector is not what it once was. We have to balance the books, and coming in right now, the budget deficit is big and we have to sort it out. It will subsume everything we want to do if we don’t address it. I think it’s solvable, but it’s going to be difficult and will require a new kind of thinking on how we do things.

Alongside the budget, I see the provost’s key role as delivering on the university strategy. The SDGs are very important for the strategy and it is important for us to think through what we are doing and how we are participating in achieving these goals. Delivering on the university’s strategic goals is made more difficult by the budget issue, but it can still be done.

Beyond that, I think the university needs to focus much more on its academic achievements, make sure it’s the best in the world in a number of areas. We have critical mass in a few research areas, which we can point to and say we are really good at this, particularly cancer trials and astroparticle physics. I think we could do with more and ensure that these research areas are noticed outside of Canada, and certainly outside of Ontario. We need to be a world player and we need to be in the global competition.

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Beyond these priorities, are there things you are looking forward to in the months ahead? Things that help balance the day-to-day?

I still go birdwatching, which is nice. There are ospreys and vultures flying around, and I am enjoying that a lot.

And I’m really looking forward to being in a seasonal environment again. I really like to see the change of the seasons – the trees changing colour, losing leaves. All of that is part of a natural rhythm that in a temperate environment you completely take for granted. I certainly did, in Hong Kong and the UAE. In Hong Kong, I would literally get confused about what time of year we were in – it’s impossible to know by looking around at the natural world.

It's obviously going to get very cold over the winter. The lake will be frozen. I think that’s cool. I’m actually really looking forward to it and watching the seasons go round.