Coveney is a Professor of Physical Chemistry, Honorary Professor of Computer Science, and the Director of the Centre for Computational Science (CCS) and Associate Director of the Advanced Research Computing Centre at University College London (UCL). He is also a Professor of Applied High Performance Computing at University of Amsterdam (UvA) and Professor Adjunct at the Yale School of Medicine, Yale University. He is a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering and Member of Academia Europaea. Coveney is active in a broad area of interdisciplinary research including condensed matter physics and chemistry, materials science, as well as life and medical sciences in all of which high performance computing plays a major role. The citation about Coveney on his election as a FREng says: Coveney "has made outstanding contributions across a wide range of scientific and engineering fields, including physics, chemistry, chemical engineering, materials, computer science, high performance computing and biomedicine, much of it harnessing the power of supercomputing to conduct original research at unprecedented space and time scales. He has shown outstanding leadership across these fields, manifested through running multiple initiatives and multi-partner interdisciplinary grants, in the UK, Europe and the US. His achievements at national and international level in advocacy and enablement are exceptional".
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 the 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.
Books
He has co-authored three popular science books with his long term friend and collaborator, Roger Highfield:
Virtual You
This book, with a foreword by Nobelist Venki Ramakrishnan, is the first popular account of efforts to build digital twins of human beings to usher in a new era of truly personalized and predictive medicine. The Financial Times listed it as a book to read in 2023. Reviews have called Virtual You ‘the most comprehensive and comprehensible account so far’ of human digital twin technology, ‘immensely thought provoking’, with a scope ‘as epic as its vision’.
Frontiers of Complexity
In 1996, Frontiers of Complexity: the search for order in a chaotic world was published with a foreword written by Nobelist Barry Blumberg. The Nobel Laureate Philip Warren Anderson commented: “Arguably the best general book so far on this highly complex subject. I believe firmly, with Coveney and Highfield, that complexity is the scientific frontier."
The Arrow of Time
In 1991, Coveney and Highfield published their first book The Arrow of Time with a foreword by Nobelist Ilya Prigogine. The book became a Sunday Times top ten best-seller and New York Times notable book of the year.
Research
Coveney has a varied and active research portfolio, covering a wide range of disciplines and areas including: computational medicine and life sciences, condensed matter physics, computational chemistry and physics, and high performance computing, and has more than 500 publications in international scientific journals.
Coveney worked with the Nobel laureate Ilya Prigogine at the Free University of Brussels (1985-87) and went on to publish work with the mathematician Oilver Penrose on rigorous foundations of irreversibility and the derivation of kinetic equations based on chaotic dynamical systems.
He collaborated with Jonathan Wattis on extensions and generalisations of the Becker-Döring and Smoluchowski equations for the kinetics of aggregation-fragmentation processes which they applied to a wide range of phenomena, from self-reproducing micelles and vesicles to a scenario for the origin of the RNA world in which they showed that self-reproducing sequences of RNA can spontaneously arise from an aqueous mixture of the RNA nucleotide bases.