Jonathan Bowen


Jonathan P. Bowen FBCS FRSA is a British computer scientist.

Overview

Jonathan Bowen is Chairman of Museophile Limited and an Emeritus Professor at London South Bank University, where he headed the Centre for Applied Formal Methods. He has been a Professor of Computer Science at Birmingham City University, Visiting Professor at the Pratt Institute, University of Westminster and King's College London, and a visiting academic at University College London.

Education

Bowen was born in Oxford, the son of Humphry Bowen, and was educated at the Dragon School, Bryanston School, prior to his matriculation at University College Oxford where he received the MA degree in Engineering Science.

Career

Bowen later worked at Imperial College, London, the Oxford University Computing Laboratory, the University of Reading, and London South Bank University. His early work was on formal methods in general, and later the Z notation in particular. He was Chair of the Z User Group from the early 1990s until 2011. In 2002, Bowen was elected Chair of the British Computer Society FACS Specialist Group on Formal Aspects of Computing Science. Since 2005, Bowen has been an Associate Editor-in-Chief of the journal Innovations in Systems and Software Engineering. He is also an associate editor on the editorial board for the ACM Computing Surveys journal, covering software engineering and formal methods. From 2008–9, he was an Associate at Praxis High Integrity Systems, working on a large industrial project using the Z notation.
Bowen's other major interest is the area of online museums. In 1994, he founded the Virtual Library museums pages, an online museums directory that was soon adopted by the International Council of Museums. In the same year he also started the Virtual Museum of Computing. In 2002, he founded Museophile Limited to help museums, especially online, for example with discussion forums. He has also worked in industry at Oxford Instruments, Marconi Instruments, Logica, Silicon Graphics, and Altran Praxis.
Bowen was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce in 2002 and of the British Computer Society in 2004. He is a Liveryman of the Worshipful Company of Information Technologists in the City of London.

Selected books

Jonathan Bowen has written and edited a number of books, including: