As corporate vice president in Microsoft Research, Tony Hey is responsible for worldwide university research collaborations with Microsoft researchers. Hey is also responsible the multidisciplinary eScience Research Group within Microsoft Research. Before joining Microsoft, Hey served as director of the U.K.'s e-Science Initiative, managing the government's efforts to build a new scientific infrastructure for collaborative, multidisciplinary, data-intensive research projects. Before leading this initiative, Hey led a research group in the area of parallel computing and was one of the originators of the MPI message-passing standard.  He was also Head of the School of Electronics and Computer Science, and Dean of Engineering and Applied Science at the University of Southampton.

Hey is a fellow of the U.K.'s Royal Academy of Engineering and was awarded a CBE for services to science in 2005. He is also a fellow of the British Computer Society, the Institute of Engineering and Technology, the Institute of Physics, and the U.S. American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). He 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. Tony Hey has a passionate interest in communicating the excitement of science and technology to young people. He has co-authored "popular" books on quantum mechanics and on relativity.