The citation about Coveney on his election as a FREng says: Coveney "has made outstanding contributions across a wide range of scientific and engineering fields, including physics, chemistry, chemical engineering, materials, computer science, high performance computing and biomedicine, much of it harnessing the power of supercomputing to conduct original research at unprecedented space and time scales.

Some parts of this work, to develop highly scalable lattice-gas and, later, lattice-Boltzmann models of complex fluids, was done in collaboration with Bruce M. Boghosian, following Schlumberger’s acquisition of a Connection Machine, the CM-5, from the company.

[17][18] At the same time, using methods from nonlinear dynamics, he was able to identify the rate-determining processes that enable one to design new compounds which inhibit the crystallisation of the mineral ettringite by molecular modelling.

Working with a PhD student, Marco Mazzeo, he developed a new code, named HemeLB, which simulates blood flow in the complex geometries of the human vasculature, as derived from a variety of medical imaging modalities.

[24][25][26][27][28][29] Coveney’s recent work is on the rapid, accurate, precise and reliable prediction of free energies of binding of ligands to proteins,[30] a major topic in drug discovery.

Working with Bruce M. Boghosian and Hongyan Wang, Coveney showed that there are a variety of problems which arise when simulating even the simplest of all dynamical systems — the generalised Bernoulli map — on a computer.

[33] The IEEE floating point numbers can produce errors which are extremely large as well others of more modest scale, but they are each wrong when compared with the known exact mathematical description of the dynamics.

In recent years, Coveney has been a leading player in the development and application of validation, verification and uncertainty quantification (VVUQ) to computer simulation codes across a wide range of domains.