Peter Coveney - Biography#

Prof Peter V. Coveney holds a chair in Physical Chemistry, is an Honorary Professor in Computer Science at University College London (UCL) and is Professor Adjunct at Yale University School of Medicine (USA). He is Director of the Centre for Computational Science (CCS) at UCL.

Coveney is active in highly interdisciplinary research ranging across 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. He has produced numerous software packages over the past twenty years, including the lattice-Boltzmann codes LB3D and HemeLB, and software to support the running of these codes and multiscale computations within complex workflows which can be deployed on distributed HPC infrastructures, as well as on high performance clouds.

He has led many large scale national and international collaborative projects, including the EPSRC RealityGrid e-Science Pilot Project (2001-05), its continuation as a Platform Grant (2005-09), and the EU FP7 Virtual Physiological Human (VPH) Network of Excellence (2008-13). He is PI on several large current grants from the European Commission and other agencies, including the EU H2020 project Verified Exascale Computing for Multiscale Applications, VECMA (2018-2021), and the EU H2020 Centre of Excellence in Computational Biomedicine, CompBioMed (2016-2019) and CompBioMed2 (2019-2023).

Coveney chaired the UK Collaborative Computational Projects Steering Panel (2005-15) and has served on programme committees of many conferences, including the 2002 Nobel Symposium on Self-Organisation; he was Chair of the UK e-Science All Hands Meeting 2008, and of the Discrete Simulation of Fluid Dynamics conference 2003. He has published more than 400 scientific papers and co-authored two best-selling books (The Arrow of Time and Frontiers of Complexity, both with Roger Highfield). He is lead author of the first textbook on Computational Biomedicine (Oxford University Press, 2014).

Coveney was a founding member of the UK Government’s E-Infrastructure Leadership Council (2012-2017) and a Medical Academy Nominated Expert to the UK Prime Minister's Council for Science and Technology on Data, Algorithms and Modelling (2012-13) which led to the creation of the London based Turing Institute.

Evidence of scientific leadership is forthcoming from the extensive series of very large grants which he has led as PI within UK, Europe and USA. A few examples follow:

Agency: US Department of Energy INCITE Award
Title: INtegrated and Scalable PredictIon of REsistanace (INSPIRE)
PI: Coveney, Prof Peter
Total costs for project period: 80 million core hours on the Titan Supercomputer, plus 25,000 node hours on the Summit Supercomputer, which is number 1 in the Top500 Supercomputers (equivalent to 15 million core hours on Titan).
Project Period: 01-Jan-18 to 01-Jan-20

Agency: EUROPEAN COMMISSION H2020
Title: A Centre of Excellence in Computational Biomedicine 2 (CompBioMed2)
PI: Coveney, Prof Peter
Grant value: €7,999,823
Project Period: 01-Oct-19 to 30-Sep-23
Partners: University College London (UK), University of Amsterdam (Netherlands), University of Edinburgh (UK), Barcelona Supercomputing Centre (Spain), SURFsara BV (Netherlands), University of Oxford (UK), University of Geneva (Switzerland), University of Sheffield (UK), CBK Sci Con Ltd (UK), Universitat Pompeu Fabra (Spain), Leibniz, Rechenzentrum (Germany), Acellera Labs SL (Spain), Evotec UK (UK), Bull, an ATOS Company (France), Janssen Pharmaceutica NV (Belgium)

Agency: EUROPEAN COMMISSION H2020
Title: A Centre of Excellence in Computational Biomedicine (CompBioMed)
PI: Coveney, Prof Peter
Grant value: €4,938,218
Project Period: 01-Oct-16 to 30-Sep-19
Partners: University College London (UK), University of Amsterdam (Netherlands), University of Edinburgh (UK), Barcelona Supercomputing Centre (Spain), SURFsara BV (Netherlands), University of Oxford (UK), University of Geneva (Switzerland), University of Sheffield (UK), CBK Sci Con Ltd (UK), Universitat Pompeu Fabra (Spain), LifeTec Group BV (Netherlands), Acellera Labs SL (Spain), Evotec UK (UK), Bull, an ATOS Company (France), Janssen Pharmaceutica NV (Belgium)

Agency: EUROPEAN COMMISSION H2020
Title: Verified Exascale Computing for Multiscale Applications (VECMA)
PI: Coveney, Prof Peter
Grant value: €3,999,478
Project Period: 15-Jun-18 to 14-Jun-21
Partners: University College London (UK), Max-Planck-Gesellschaft Zur Forderung Der Wissenschaften eV (Germany), Brunel University London (UK), Bayerische Akademie Der Wissenschaften (Germany), Bull SAS (France), Stichting Centrum Voor Wiskunde En Informatica (Netherlands), CBK Sci Con Limited (UK), Universiteit Van Amsterdam (Netherlands), Instytut Chemii Bioorganicznej Polskiej Akademii Nauk (Poland)

Agency: EUROPEAN COMMISSION FP7
Title: VIRTUAL PHYSIOLOGICAL HUMAN NETWORK OF EXCELLENCE (VPH NOE)
P.I.: Coveney, Prof Peter
Grant value: € 8,000,000.00
Project period: 1-Jun-2008 to 30-Nov-2012
Partners: Universite Libre De Bruxelles (Belgium), European Molecular Biology Laboratory (Germany), Institut Municipal D'assistencia Sanitaria (Spain), Universidad Pompeu Fabra (Spain), Consorcio Mar Parc De Salut De Barcelona (Spain), Institut National De Recherche Eninformatique Et Automatique (France), Geie Ercim (France), Centre National De La Recherche Scientifique CNRS (France), Istituto Ortopedico Rizzoli (Italy), The University Of Auckland (New Zealand), Karolinska Institutet (Sweden), The University Of Nottingham (United Kingdom), The Chancellor, Masters And Scholars Of The University Of Oxford (United Kingdom), The University Of Sheffield (United Kingdom), Universite D'evry-Val D'essonne (France), Universite Joseph Fourier Grenoble 1 (France), Institut National De La Sante Et De La Recherche Medicale (France), Institut National Des Sciences Appliquees De Lyon (France), Universite Lyon 1 Claude Bernard (France), Foundation For Research And Technology Hellas (Greece), Consiglio Nazionale Delle Ricerche (Italy), Sheffield Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust (United Kingdom)

Agency: MRC Title: Medical Bioinformatics: Data-driven Discovery For Personalised Medicine
PI: Coveney, Prof Peter
Grant value: £8,875,955
Project Period: 16-Jun-14 to 15-Jun-19

Agency: EPSRC
Title: The RealityGrid - a tool for investigating condensed matter & materials
P.I.: Coveney, Prof Peter
Grant value: £3,441,471.00
Project period: 1-Nov-2001 to 30-Nov-2005