CBE for Professor of Computation
Tony Hey, Professor of Computation at the University of Southampton and a senior member of the University's School of Electronics and Computer Science, has been awarded a CBE in the New Year's Honours List.
Professor Hey, who is currently on secondment from the School as Director of the UK's e-Science Programme, was honoured for his services to science.
A former Head of the Department of Electronics and Computer Science and Dean of Engineering and Applied Science at Southampton, Tony Hey is also a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering, the British Computer Society, the Institution of Electrical Engineers and a Member of the Institution of Electrical and Electronic Engineers.
He has worked in the field of parallel and distributed computing since the early 1980s. He was instrumental in the development of the MPI message-passing standard and in the Genesis Distributed Memory Parallel Benchmark suite. In 1991, he founded the Southampton Parallel Applications Centre, which has played a leading technology transfer role in Europe and the UK in collaborative industrial projects. His personal research interests are concerned with performance engineering for Grid applications but he also retains an interest in experimental explorations of quantum computing and quantum information theory.
As the Director of the UK e-Science Programme, Tony Hey is currently excited by the vision of the increasingly global scientific collaborations being enabled by the development of the next generation 'Grid' middleware. The successful development of the Grid will have profound implications for industry and he is much involved with industry in the move towards OpenSource/OpenStandard Grid software.
Tony Hey also has a passionate interest in communicating the excitement of science to young people. He is the author of two popular science books: The Quantum Universe and Einstein's Mirror. Most recently he edited the Feynman Lectures on Computation for publication, and a companion volume entitled Feynman and Computation.