Peter Coveney

Peter V. Coveney is currently (April 2005) Professor in Physical Chemistry and Director, Centre for Computational Science (CCS) at University College London (UCL).

Coveney is probably best known to the general public for his two popularizations in science:

1. PV Coveney and RR Highfield, The Arrow of Time (WH Allen, London, 1990; Ballantine, New York, 1991).
2. PV Coveney and RR Highfield, Frontiers of Complexity (Fawcett, New York, 1995; Faber and Faber, London, 1995).

These books convey his research interests. He has been associated with chemists, physicists, mathematicians, materials scientists, engineers, and computer scientists of Schlumberger Cambridge Research, Molecular Simulations Inc. (MSI) and Silicon Graphics Inc. (SGI), often using their computation facilities, as well as those of CSAR U.K. National Supercomputing Facility at Manchester, and the University of Cambridge High Performance Computing Facility.

The CCS is using a highly scalable molecular dynamics code: Large Atomic/Molecular Massively Parallel Simulator. The code was originally developed as part of a US-based collaboration involving Sandia and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories, Du Pont, Bristol-Myers Squibb and Cray Research. CCS is collaborating with Dr. C. Laughton's group at the University of Nottingham on applications of this code to large scale studies of DNA dynamics.

Coveney's specialities include

• Modelling of complex nonlinear physicochemical processes
  • Molecular-scale computational chemistry
  • Mesoscale modelling and simulation
  • Kinetics and Statistical mechanics of these processes