Anthony Finkelstein


Anthony Charles Wiener Finkelstein is a British software engineer. He is Chief Scientific Adviser for National Security to HM Government. His research is based at the Alan Turing Institute and he holds a Chair in Software Systems engineering at University College London.

Education and early life

Anthony Finkelstein was born on 28 July 1959. He was educated at University College School, the University of Bradford, the London School of Economics and the Royal College of Art.

Career and research

Finkelstein's scientific work is in the broad area of software development tools and processes. He has also worked on applications of systems modelling in the life sciences.
Before being appointed to his current post, Finkelstein was the Head of UCL Computer Science and then Dean of the UCL Faculty of Engineering Sciences. He has served on the editorial boards of ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology and IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, and was founder editor of Automated Software Engineering. He was appointed in 2013 as a Member of Council of the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council by the Minister for Universities and Science, David Willetts. He was appointed as the British government's Chief Scientific Adviser for National Security in December 2015. His main affiliation is to the government office for science and works with the full range of government organisations. In an interview for The Engineer in March 2018, Finkelstein explained that he deals most often with the Ministry of Defence, the Home Office and the police.
Finkelstein is a Visiting Professor at Imperial College London and at the National Institute of Informatics, Tokyo, Japan. He is a member of the Board of the NHS Royal National Orthopaedic Hospital and of the Scientific Advisory Board of the Singapore National Research Foundation.

Honours and awards

Finkelstein is an elected Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering. He is also an elected Member of Academia Europaea and a Fellow of the City and Guilds of London Institute. He is a Fellow of the Institution of Engineering and Technology and the British Computer Society.
In 2009 he received the Oliver Lodge Medal of the IET for achievement in Information Technology. In 2013 he received the Outstanding Service Award from the International Federation for Information Processing.
Finkelstein was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire in the 2016 Birthday Honours for services to computer science and engineering.

Personal life

He is a grandson of Alfred Wiener, founder of the Wiener Library and a brother of the peer, Lord Daniel Finkelstein OBE, associate editor of The Times and sister of Tamara Finkelstein, Permanent Secretary at Defra. His father, Ludwik Finkelstein FREng OBE, was a Professor Emeritus of Measurement and Instrumentation. He is married and has two sons.