Peter Coveney

65
Peter Coveney bigraphy, stories - Chemists

Peter Coveney : biography

Peter V. Coveney

Education

Coveney was awarded his Doctor of Philosophy degree from the University of Oxford for his work on Semiclassical methods in scattering and spectroscopy.

Research

Coveney’s research focusses on many different areas, from molecular and mesoscale fluid dynamics simulations, to computational biomedicine, all based on high performance computational techniques.

Coveney is also known to the general public for his two popularizations in science co-authored with Roger Highfield, The Arrow of Time and Frontiers of Complexity.

These books convey his research interests. He has been associated with chemists, physicists, mathematicians, materials scientists, engineers, and computer scientists of Schlumberger, Molecular Simulations Inc. (MSI) now Accelrys and Silicon Graphics Inc. (SGI), often using their computation facilities, as well as those of UK 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 (LAMMPS). 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 Charles 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
  • Chemical kinetics and Statistical mechanics of these processes