Updated: June 27, 2011

As corporate vice president of Microsoft Research Connections, Tony Hey is responsible for worldwide external research collaboration in Microsoft Research. He leads the company's efforts to build long-term public-private partnerships with global scientific and engineering communities, spanning broad reach and in-depth engagements with academic and research institutions, related government agencies and industry partners. His responsibilities also include working with internal Microsoft groups to build future technologies and products that will transform computing for scientific and engineering research. Hey manages the U.S.-based Connections group for North America, South America and Europe, and the multidisciplinary eScience Research Group, and has dotted-line management responsibility for Microsoft Research's Connections teams in Asia and India.

Before joining Microsoft, Hey served as director of the U.K.'s e-Science Initiative, managing the government's efforts to provide scientists and researchers with access to key computing technologies. Before leading this initiative, Hey was head of the school of electronics and computer science, and dean of engineering and applied science at the University of Southampton, where he helped build his department into one of the leading computer science research institutions in the U.K.

His research interests focus on parallel programming for parallel systems built from mainstream commodity components. With Jack Dongarra, Rolf Hempel and David Walker, he wrote the first draft of a specification for a new message-passing standard called MPI. This initiated the process that led to the successful MPI standard of today. Hey is a fellow of the U.K.'s Royal Academy of Engineering and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in the U.S. He is also a fellow of the British Computer Society, the Institute of Engineering and Technology, and the Institute of Physics. He was awarded a CBE for services to science in 2005. Hey is the co-author of a best-selling graduate text in "Gauge Theories in Particle Physics" and edited the "Feynman Lectures in Computation" for publication.

Hey also has a passionate interest in communicating the excitement of science to young people. He has written "popular" books on quantum mechanics and on relativity.

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Recent Speeches

Research Faculty Summit 2011
July 18, 2011

The Fourth Paradigm, eResearch and Digital Scholarship (.pptx file, 106 mb)
June 8, 2011

Open Data, Open Science, Open Source (.pptx file, 10.4 mb)
May 18, 2011