Tony Hey

Education Hey was educated at King Edward's School, Birmingham in 1970 supervised by P. K. Kabir. He was a student of Worcester College, Oxford and St John's College, Oxford. In 1990 he was a visiting fellow at the Thomas J. Watson Research Center of IBM Research. He then worked with Jack Dongarra, Rolf Hempel and David Walker, to define the Message Passing Interface (MPI) which became a de facto open standard for parallel scientific computing. In 1998 he was a visiting research fellow at Los Alamos National Laboratory in the USA.

Hey led the UK's e-Science Programme from March 2001 to June 2005. He was appointed corporate vice-president of technical computing at Microsoft on 27 June 2005. Later he became corporate vice-president of external research, and in 2011 corporate vice-president of Microsoft Research Connections until his departure in 2014.

Since 2015, Hey has held the position of Chief Data Scientist at the UK's Science and Technology Facilities Council, and is a Senior Data Science Fellow at the University of Washington eScience Institute.

Hey is the editor of the journal Concurrency and Computation: Practice and Experience. Among other scientific advisory boards in Europe and the United States, he is a member of the Global Grid Forum (GGF) Advisory Committee.

Publications Hey has authored or co-authored a number of books including The Fourth Paradigm: Data-Intensive Scientific Discovery, The Quantum Universe, The New Quantum Universe, The Feynman Lectures on Computation and Einstein's Mirror. Hey has also authored numerous peer-reviewed journal papers. His latest book is a popular book on computer science called The Computing Universe: A Journey through a Revolution.

Awards and honours Hey had an open scholarship to Worcester College, Oxford, from 1963 to 1967, won the Scott Prize for Physics in 1967, senior scholarship to St John's College, Oxford, in 1968 and was a Harkness Fellow from 1970 through 1972. In 2017 he was elected a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM).