Evans made many scholarly contributions to the field of organic chemistry. Although he is best known for his work on the aldol reaction, he also developed methodology for anionic oxy-Cope rearrangements, metal catalyzed hydroborations, and catalytic, enantioselective reactions based on bis-oxazoline (box) ligands. The Evans–Saksena reductionand Evans–Tishchenko reaction take their names from him.He is also well known for preparing a set of unpublished though widely disseminated lecture notes for Chemistry 206, a graduate-level organic chemistry course at Harvard.