Geoffrey C. Fox

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 at the Computer Science Biocomplexity Institute at the University of Virginia.

Early Life and Education
Fox was educated at the Leys School and Trinity College, Cambridge. In 1964, he was the Senior Wrangler at Cambridge, the highest scorer in the mathematics tripos. That same year, he played in the annual chess match against Oxford University and received the Mayhew Prize for Applied Mathematics. He earned a Ph.D. in theoretical physics from Cambridge University in 1967.

Academic Career
Fox's academic career began at Caltech, where he worked from 1970 to 1990. He then joined Syracuse University from 1990 to 2000 and Florida State University from 2000 to 2001. In July 2001, Fox became a professor at Indiana University., where he served as the director of the Digital Science Center and associate dean for research and graduate studies at the School of Informatics and Computing. As of March 2024, he holds the position of professor at the University of Virginia's Computer Science Biocomplexity Institute.

Contributions and Honors
In 1989, Fox was elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society for contributions to the use of computers in particle physics and parallel computing. He is also a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery.

Fox received the High-Performance Parallel and Distributed Computing (HPDC) Achievement Award and the Ken Kennedy Award for his foundational contributions to parallel computing in 2019.

Research and Projects
Fox was the director of FutureSystems, a cyberinfrastructure project active until December, 2021. He is involved in projects aimed at enhancing the capabilities of minority serving institutions. His research interests include applications of computer science in bioinformatics, defense, earthquake and ice-sheet science, particle physics, and chemical informatics. He focuses on 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.

Publications and Mentorship
Throughout his career, Fox has supervised the Ph.D. studies of 75 students and authored over 1200 publications in physics and computer science, including his book Parallel Computing Works!.