Evelyn Tang is an Assistant Professor of Physics and Astronomy in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Rice University, where she joined the faculty in 2021, and serves as a senior scientist at the Center for Theoretical Biological Physics. She earned a BS in Physics from Yale University in 2007, an MPhil in Physics from the University of Cambridge in 2008 as a Gates Cambridge Scholar, and a PhD in Physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2015 under Xiao-Gang Wen, focusing on novel topological states in quantum electronic systems. Prior to her appointment at Rice, Tang was a group leader at the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization and an Africk Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania from 2015 to 2017 in the group of Dani Bassett. She also held a Simons-Berkeley Research Fellowship in 2018.

Tang's research develops topological and non-equilibrium frameworks to explain robust function in living systems, including circadian clocks and gene regulatory networks. Her work examines living and active matter, emergent dynamics necessary for system regulation, growth, and motility, employing statistical mechanics, information theory, dynamical theory, topology, and geometry to predict robust dynamics from quantum to biological systems. She investigates out-of-equilibrium phenomena, such as timescales longer than those of underlying components. Tang has received the NSF CAREER Award in 2022 supporting research on topological invariants in biological systems and synthetic materials, the inaugural IUPAP Interdisciplinary Early Career Scientist Prize, the Scialog award, and the Africk Family Postdoctoral Fellowship. Key publications include 'Colloquium: Control of dynamics in brain networks' in Reviews of Modern Physics (2018, with D.S. Bassett) and 'A topological mechanism for robust and efficient global oscillations in gene regulatory networks' in Nature Communications (2024). Her contributions demonstrate that biological systems exhibit protected topological states similar to quantum systems, enabling energy-efficient performance in circadian clocks.

Professional Email: e.tang@rice.edu