Professor Atkinson will be joining the University in June 2015.  He is an eminent academic with valuable experience and management skills from the Higher Education sector.  He will be an asset to the Faculty and to the University’s senior management team.

The Vice-Chancellor said, “Peter has an excellent academic record with an outstanding national and international profile.  He joins Lancaster University at an exciting time as the Faculty of Science and Technology has largely achieved outstanding results in the REF 2014 exercise and the University continues to drive forward its ambitions and goals to 2020.  I am delighted that Peter has chosen to join us at this time.”

Professor Atkinson is a Geographer with an international reputation for research into remote sensing, geographical information science and spatial statistics.

He was previously Professor and Head of the School of Geography at the University of Southampton, where he was part of the central team leading Southampton University’s REF2014 submission. He holds the Belle van Zuylen Chair in the Faculty of Geosciences at Utrecht University, the Netherlands and was also recently Visiting Fellow at Green-Templeton College and the Department of Zoology, Oxford University.

Professor Atkinson has published around 180 scientific papers in international journals and is currently Associate Editor for Computers and Geosciences and sits on the editorial boards of journals including Geographical Analysis, Spatial Statistics, the International Journal of Applied Earth Observation and Geoinformation, and Environmental Informatics.

He received his PhD degree from the University of Sheffield and, more recently, an MBA from the University of Southampton in 2012.

Professor Atkinson said: “I am delighted to be joining Lancaster University which has an enviable international reputation for the quality of its research and teaching and I look forward to working with my new colleagues. It is an exciting time for the University as it seeks to build on an outstanding REF2014 result and develops, beyond 50 years, into a globally connected institution.”