The Coalition for Networked Information (CNI), the Association of Research Libraries (ARL), and EDUCAUSE are pleased to announce that physicist and computer scientist Tony Hey has been named the 2024 recipient of the Paul Evan Peters Award. The award recognizes notable, lasting achievements in the creation and innovative use of network-based information resources and services that advance scholarship and intellectual productivity.
“Tony is a wonderful choice for the Paul Evan Peters Award,” commented CNI Executive Director Clifford Lynch. “While I think he is probably best known to our community for his work envisioning and advancing e-science (often called cyberinfrastructure in US circles), it’s remarkable to me how his work and his leadership repeatedly connect with the evolution of networked information—his contributions to high-performance computing, repositories, and scholarly communication, and the rich array of collaborations he established and advanced during his time at Microsoft. And, of course, he edited and highlighted the absolutely foundational Feynman Lectures on Computation. What a tremendous set of contributions!”
In 2023, Hey retired after eight years as chief data scientist at the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) in the United Kingdom (UK), following a prolific career in physics, high-performance computing, computer science, and e-science. His role with STFC was wide-ranging—he assisted in the development of STFC’s strategy for data-intensive science and high-performance computing; looked at research networks for transferring large amounts of experimental and observational data at STFC and across the UK with the Jisc and JANET networks; helped to develop a program of artificial intelligence for science; and liaised with international partners. Hey commented that, in this role, he “particularly liked having the freedom to look across all ‘big data’ issues for the whole of STFC.”
He began his career as a physicist with a doctorate from the University of Oxford and a post-doctoral fellowship at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) with Nobelist Richard Feynman. After time at CERN (European Council for Nuclear Research) and a professorship at the University of Southampton, he transitioned to work in computer science. He led Southampton’s innovative transputer-based parallel computing research group that pioneered parallel benchmarks for distributed memory message-passing machines, and he co-wrote the first draft of the message passing interface (MPI) message-passing standard.
After serving as head of department and dean of engineering at Southampton and establishing one of the first open access digital research repositories, he was appointed director of the UK e-Science Initiative, where he recognized the significance of big data in science. With support from Jisc, Hey was able to fund what was likely the world’s first Digital Curation Centre (DCC) in Edinburgh in 2004. The DCC established the first International Digital Curation Conference and introduced the first attempt at a data management plan (DMP) for scientists.
Hey worked at Microsoft and Microsoft Research, leading global university research engagements. As chief data scientist at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, he founded the Scientific Machine Learning Group. He also held fellowships at the University of Washington and completed sabbaticals at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Caltech, IBM Research, and Los Alamos National Laboratory. Hey was awarded a CBE (Commander of the British Empire) for his contributions to science. He is a fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Institute of Engineering and Technology, the British Computer Society, the Institute of Physics, and the Royal Academy of Engineering.
“Tony Hey embodies the spirit of the Paul Evan Peters Award through his unwavering commitment to advancing science via information technology and his extensive and foundational contributions to the field,” Andrew Pace, ARL executive director, stated.
A prolific author, Hey has written around 150 scientific papers and several books, including Gauge Theories in Particle Physics, Artificial Intelligence for Science: A Deep Learning Revolution, The New Quantum Universe, and The Computing Universe: A Journey through a Revolution. He worked closely with Turing Award winner Jim Gray and edited The Fourth Paradigm: Data Intensive Scientific Discovery as a tribute to Gray’s work. Two of his papers particularly relevant to CNI are “The Data Deluge: An e-Science Perspective,” co-authored with Professor Anne Trefethen, which was one of the earliest papers on the importance of curating and linking scientific data, and “e-Science and Its Implications for the Library Community,” co-authored with Jessie Hey, which emphasized linking experimental datasets to research papers.
EDUCAUSE President and CEO John O’Brien noted “From underscoring the vital role of big data in science to his extensive list of published works, Hey has continually advanced pivotal efforts in cyberinfrastructure, scholarship, research, science, and education.”
Selection committee members included: Joshua Greenberg, director, Alfred P. Sloan Foundation; Beth Sandore Namachchivaya, university librarian, University of Waterloo; Xuemao Wang, dean of libraries and Charles Deering McCormick University Librarian, Northwestern University; and Diane Goldenberg-Hart, assistant executive director, CNI.
The award will be presented during the CNI Fall 2024 Membership Meeting in Washington, DC, December 9–10, where Hey will deliver the Paul Evan Peters Memorial Lecture. The talk will be recorded and released on CNI’s YouTube and Vimeo channels. Previous award recipients include Paul Courant (2022), Francine Berman (2020), Herbert Van de Sompel (2017), Donald A.B. Lindberg (2014), Christine L. Borgman (2011), Daniel E. Atkins (2008), Paul Ginsparg (2006), Brewster Kahle (2004), Vinton Gray Cerf (2002), and Tim Berners-Lee (2000).
CNI, ARL, and EDUCAUSE sponsor the Paul Evan Peters Award, established with additional funding from Microsoft and Xerox Corporations. The award honors the memory of Paul Evan Peters (1947–1996), a visionary and coalition builder in higher education and scholarly communication. He led CNI from its founding in 1990 with informed insight, exuberant direction, eloquence, and awareness of the needs of its varied constituencies of librarians, technologists, publishers, and others in the digital world.
Gary Price (gprice@gmail.com) is a librarian, writer, consultant, and frequent conference speaker based in the Washington D.C. metro area.
He earned his MLIS degree from Wayne State University in Detroit.
Price has won several awards including the SLA Innovations in Technology Award and Alumnus of the Year from the Wayne St. University Library and Information Science Program. From 2006-2009 he was Director of Online Information Services at Ask.com.
