Peter Coveney


Coveney is a Professor of Physical Chemistry, Honorary Professor of Computer Science, and the Director of the Centre for Computational Science at University College London. He is also a Professor of Applied High Performance Computing at University of Amsterdam, Professor Adjunct in the Medical School at Yale University and Member of Academia Europaea.

Education

Coveney was awarded a Doctor of Philosophy degree from the University of Oxford in 1985 for his work on Semiclassical methods in scattering and spectroscopy.

Career

Coveney has held positions at many of the world’s top institutes throughout his academic career spanning over 30 years, including University of Oxford, Princeton University, Schlumberger and QMUL, and currently holds positions at UCL, UvA and Yale, as well as acting as a Member of several academic councils in the UK and EU.

Research

Coveney has a varied and active research portfolio, covering a wide range of disciplines and areas including: and life sciences, condensed matter physics, computational chemistry and physics, and high performance computing, and has more than 400 publications in international scientific journals. He has also led several large scale international projects, most notably, the EPSRC RealityGrid e-Science Pilot Project and its extension project, and the EU FP7 Virtual Physiological Human Network of Excellent. He is currently the Principal Investigator on several grants from the European Commission and other agencies, including the EU Horizon 2020 projects Verified Exascale Computing for Multiscale Applications, "VECMA" and Centre of Excellence in Computational Biomedicine,"CompBioMed2". The original CompBioMed initiative was launched after Coveney and his team successfully challenged the EU following a rejected grant proposal. This led to him launching a critique of Big Data in Biology with Ed Dougherty of Texas A&M and Roger Highfield..
He has also been the recipient of many US NSF and DoE, and European DEISA and PRACE supercomputing awards, providing him and his research group access to several petascale computers.
Coveney has also chaired the UK Collaborative Computational Projects Steering Panel and has served on the programme committees of many conferences, most notably the 2002 Nobel Symposium on self-organization. He is a founding member of the UK Government's e-Infrastructure Leadership Council and a Medical Academy Nominated Expert to the UK Prime Minister's Council for Science and Technology on Data, Algorithms and Modelling, which has led to the creation of the London based Alan Turing Institute.
Coveney's specialities include:
He is also known publicly as the co-author of two popularisations in science, The Arrow of Time and Frontiers of Complexity., written alongside friend and long term collaborator Roger Highfield.