Peter Atkinson

Peter Atkinson is Distinguished Professor of Spatial Data Science at Lancaster University, Lancaster, UK where he was also Executive Dean of the Faculty of Science and Technology from 2015 to 2025 and interim Executive Dean of the Faculty of Health and Medicine from 2018 to 2019. Professor Atkinson’s research interests are highly interdisciplinary with a focus on methods for remote sensing, spatial statistics and artificial intelligence applied to a wide range of grand challenge-motivated questions in science, including in ecology, spatial epidemiology, land systems, food insecurity, and natural hazard risk. He is most highly regarded for his research on geostatistical change-of-support theory, downscaling and multi-modal data fusion in Earth observation. Professor Atkinson is a Fellow of the Learned Society of Wales and is an inaugural highly ranked scholar on ScholarGPS (2024, 2025) and an ISI highly cited researcher (2023, 2024). He will be awarded the William Christian Krumbein Medal of the International Association of Mathematical Geosciences (IAMG) in Montreal in 2026. He received the Cuthbert Peek Award of the Royal Geographical Society-Institute of British Geographers (RGS-IBG) in 2024, was elected the 2020 Distinguished Lecturer of the IAMG, and received the Peter Burrough Medal of the International Spatial Accuracy Research Association (ISARA) in 2016. He held the Belle van Zuylen Chair with Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands in 2014 and was Visiting Fellow at Green-Templeton College, Oxford University 2012-14. Professor Atkinson is founding Editor-in-Chief of Science of Remote Sensing and Associate Editor of Environmetrics.