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Steve Kevan is currently Professor of Physics at the University of Oregon. He earned his Bachelor of Arts at Wesleyan University in Middletown, CT, in 1976, and his PhD in Physical Chemistry from the University of California, Berkeley in 1980, working with Prof. David Shirley. In his thesis work he pioneered the photoelectron diffraction technique for determining adsorbate surface structures and applied this to study sulfur, selenium, and CO adsorbed on low index single crystal nickel surfaces.

After completing his PhD, Kevan accepted a position as Member of Technical Staff at AT&T Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, NJ, where he worked for 6 years.  During that time, he developed and used new instrumentation for performing high resolution angle-resolved photoemission at the National Synchrotron Light Source at Brookhaven National Laboratory.  He focused in particular on high resolution studies of intrinsic surface states on metal and semiconductor surfaces, discovering and characterizing many new states. In his final years at Bell Labs, Kevan collaborated with Larry Dubois to apply an old idea called 'dispersion compensation' to a new high resolution electron scattering spectrometer.

In 1986, Kevan accepted an Associate Professor position at the University of Oregon, where he has been since that time.  While at Oregon, Kevan has continued his work on surface electronic structure, pioneering a special emphasis on surface Fermiology in 1987.  With constantly improving resolution, this program has evolved its focus in recent years to manybody effects at surfaces, where the details of the electron-phonon and electron-magnon interaction can be studied.  In his early years at Oregon, Kevan constructed a second-generation dispersion compensation electron scattering spectrometer and used this to probe simple kinetic processes at surfaces.  His work lead to an understanding of 'kinetic compensation' in desorption kinetics, wherein the activation energy and Arrhenius prefactor are coupled in a particular way.

Part of Kevan's motivation for moving to Oregon was the construction of the Advanced Light Source at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, a third generation synchrotron radiation facility.  He has been involved with that facility since its early planning stages, and remains an active user.  He has served on and chaired several of the standing committees at the facility.  All of his photoemission work is presently done there.  Also, Kevan and his collaborators have used the very high brightness of undulator radiation to pioneer the soft x-ray analogs of speckle metrology and dynamic light scattering.  A new beamline and end station devoted to coherent soft x-ray magnetic scattering has recently been commissioned.

Kevan has over 140 refereed publications, 27 in Physical Review Letters and 1 in Science.