Martha Evens is an emeritus professor in the Department of Computer Science at Illinois Institute of Technology. During her career at IIT, she served as advisor or co-advisor to over 100 Ph.D. students.
Evens graduated summa cum laude from Bryn Mawr College in 1955 with a degree in math. She was very active during her time at Bryn Mawr, taking many Greek classes, serving as president of the Classics Club, and playing both field hockey and basketball for the college. After graduating, she received a Fulbright Fellowship to study at the University of Paris. In 1957 she received a master’s in mathematics from Radcliffe College and was directly hired as a mathematician at MIT Lincoln Laboratory. It was here that she first worked with a computer—an IBM 709. Evens earned a Ph.D. in computer science from Northwestern University in 1975. She began her career at IIT shortly after.
Over the years, Evens has been a champion of computer science and computer science students. In 1980, she chaired the Chicago Chapter of Computer Machinery and in 1984 she was president of the Association for Computational Linguistics. Evens still enjoys refereeing papers for several journals.