Geoffrey Charles Fox (born 7 June 1944) is a British-born American theoretical physicist and computer scientist. As of March 2024, he is a professor in the Computer Science Biocomplexity Institute at the University of Virginia. Fox was educated at the

Leys School The Leys School is a co-educational independent school in Cambridge, England. It is a day and boarding school for about 574 pupils between the ages of eleven and eighteen, and a member of the Headmasters' and Headmistresses' Conference. Histo ...

and Trinity College, Cambridge. In 1964, he was the Senior Wrangler at Cambridge, the best performer in the mathematics tripos. In the same year, he played in the annual chess match against Oxford University and was also awarded the

Mayhew Prize The Mayhew Prize is a prize awarded annually by the Faculty of Mathematics, University of Cambridge to the student showing the greatest distinction in applied mathematics, primarily for courses offered by DAMTP, but also for some courses offered b ...

for Applied Mathematics. He was awarded a Ph.D. in theoretical physics from Cambridge University in 1967. He subsequently worked at Caltech from 1970 until 1990, at

Syracuse University Syracuse University (informally 'Cuse or SU) is a Private university, private research university in Syracuse, New York. Established in 1870 with roots in the Methodist Episcopal Church, the university has been nonsectarian since 1920. Locate ...

from 1990 to 2000, and

Florida State University Florida State University (FSU) is a public research university in Tallahassee, Florida. It is a senior member of the State University System of Florida. Founded in 1851, it is located on the oldest continuous site of higher education in the st ...

from 2000 to 2001. In July of 2001 Fox became a professor at Indiana University. There he was the director of the Digital Science Center and associate dean for research and graduate studies at the School of Informatics and Computing. In 1989, he was elected as a

Fellow of the American Physical Society The American Physical Society honors members with the designation ''Fellow'' for having made significant accomplishments to the field of physics. The following lists are divided chronologically by the year of designation. * List of American Physic ...

"...for contributions centered on novel uses of computers; firstly, in the phenomenological comparison of theory and experiment in particle physics, and secondly, in the design and use of parallel computers". He is also a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery.. He received the High-Performance Parallel and Distributed Computing (HPDC) Achievement Award and the

Ken Kennedy Award The Ken Kennedy Award, established in 2009 by the Association for Computing Machinery and the IEEE Computer Society in memory of Ken Kennedy, is awarded annually and recognizes substantial contributions to programmability and productivity in compu ...

for foundational contributions to parallel computing in 2019. He was the director of FutureSystems, which was a cyberinfrastructure test to enable development of new approaches to scientific computing before it was shut down in December, 2021. He is engaged in various projects to enhance the capabilities of minority serving institutions. Over the years, Fox has supervised the Ph.D. of 75 students and written over 1200 publications in physics and computer science according, including his book ''Parallel Computing Works!''. Fox currently works on applications of computer science in bioinformatics, defense, earthquake and ice-sheet science, particle physics, and chemical informatics. His current research interests are network systems science, high performance computing and clouds, AI for science, deep learning for data analytics and simulation surrogates, and the interface of data engineering and data science with data systems.

Notes

1944 births Living people People from Dunfermline Free software programmers Indiana University faculty Alumni of Trinity College, Cambridge Computer science educators 2011 Fellows of the Association for Computing Machinery Fellows of the American Physical Society Syracuse University faculty Florida State University faculty California Institute of Technology faculty {{UK-scientist-stub