People

Professor Cliff Jones

Cliff Jones is (Emeritus) Professor of Computing Science with the additional title of “Senior Research Investigator”. His research interests are mainly in “formal methods“.

He has spent over 20 years of his career in industry. He had 15 years in IBM  and saw the creation of VDM which is one of the better known “formal methods“. After his Doctorate in Oxford, he moved directly to a chair at Manchester University where they built a world-class Formal Methods group. During his time at Manchester, he had a five-year Senior Fellowship funded by the research council; later he also spent a sabbatical at Cambridge for the Newton Institute event on “Semantics”. In 1996 he moved back into industry with a software company (Harlequin), directing some 50 developers on Information Management projects and finally became overall Technical Director before leaving to re-join academia in 1999 to take the chair in Newcastle.

Much of my research focuses on formal (compositional) development methods for concurrent systems and support systems for formal reasoning. I am a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering (FREng), ACM, BCS, and IET.