Everhart is President Emeritus of the California Institute of Technology and Professor Emeritus of Electrical Engineering and Applied Physics. He is a magna cum laude graduate of Harvard University, where he received an A.B. Degree in physics. He received his M.S. degree from UC Los Angeles in 1955, and a Ph.D. in engineering from Cambridge University, England in 1958. He joined UC Berkeley in 1958, where he served in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science for more than 20 years. After being Dean of Engineering at Cornell University (1979-84) and Chancellor of the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana (1984-87), he accepted the presidency at Caltech in 1987. He holds a guest appointment at UC Santa Barbara as a Distinguished Visiting Professor and Senior Advisor to the Chancellor.

Dr. Everhart has served on numerous committees and boards for the National Academy of Engineering, the Secretary of Energy, and Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. Throughout his academic career he has maintained a close relationship with industry, having served on numerous boards including GM, Hewlett-Packard, Agilent Technologies, Hughes Electronics, Raytheon and Saint-Gobain. He also has strong international ties, having been a doctoral student at Cambridge University, England; a visiting faculty member in Japan, Germany, and England; and Pro Vice Chancellor of Cambridge in 1998. Everhart's honors and awards include the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Centennial Medal; the 1989 Benjamin Garver Lamme Award from the American Society for Engineering Education; the Clark Kerr Award from UC Berkeley in 1992; the Founder's Award in 1995 from the Energy and Resources Group at Berkeley; and the IEEE Founders Medal and Okawa Prize in 2002. He is a member of Phi Beta Kappa, Sigma Xi, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, and is a Foreign Member of the Royal Academy of Engineering. He currently serves on the board of trustees of Caltech and the board of overseers of Harvard University.