Dennis Frederick Evans FRS (7 March 1928 – 6 November 1990) was an English chemist who made important contributions to nuclear magnetic resonance, magnetochemistry and other aspects of chemistry.
His father George Frederick Evans was a master carpenter and his mother (née Gladys Martha Taylor) was a dressmaker.
[1] In 1953-4 he became a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Chicago with Robert S. Mulliken working on the electronic spectra of halogens in organic solvents, producing four papers under his own name.
In 1959, he devised a procedure, now called the Evans Method, in which an NMR tube containing the paramagnetic species is dissolved in water-tert-butanol in the presence of a capillary of pure tert-butanol.
In addition to his use of NMR to determine magnetic susceptibilities of species in solution (see above) he made wide use of the technique in the study of organometallic and coordination complexes.
He kept a range of exotic pets which he looked after well, e. g. a Cayman Islands alligator and a five-foot sand snake called George fed with live toads obtained from his local Chelsea pub.