People

An expert in cutting-edge technical communication, Evia holds a master’s degree in computer systems from Universidad La Salle in Mexico City and a doctorate in technical communication and rhetoric from Texas Tech University. In his doctoral program he specialized in technical documentation, content operations, and user experience, with an emphasis on misrepresented audiences.

Evia, who joined the Virginia Tech faculty in 2004, focuses his research on planning and developing technology-based solutions for workplace communication problems, particularly in situations involving multicultural audiences. He is particularly interested in Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA), which uses Extensible Markup Language, or XML, to define a set of guidelines for encoding documents in a format that can be read by both humans and machines.

He has worked with OASIS, the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards, as a voting member of the Technical Committee for DITA. He also co-chaired the organization’s subcommittee on Lightweight DITA, an authoring method he helped create that uses plain text with notations.

Evia authored the book Creating Intelligent Content with Lightweight DITA in 2018 and co-edited Outsourcing Technical Communication: Issues, Policies, and Practices a decade earlier. He serves on the editorial boards of two journals, Communication Design Quarterly and IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication. He is also a co-administrator of the Hispanics in Computing LinkedIn group.

At Virginia Tech, Evia is a faculty affiliate of the Center for Human-Computer Interaction, a faculty fellow at the Center for Communicating Science, and a member of the stakeholder committee of the Center for Humanities.

Evia is also a member of the Virginia Tech Hispanic/Latino Faculty and Staff Caucus. During the 2020-2021 academic year, he was the faculty fellow at El Centro, the Hispanic and Latinx Cultural and Community Center.