Prof. Mike Jackson, the founder and Director of the Centre for Geospatial Sciences (CGS) at the University of Nottingham, retired at the end of July. He has been succeeded in the role of Director by Jeremy Morley. Mike joined the University of Nottingham in 2005 from QinetiQ where he had been Director of the Space Division. CGS quickly built a reputation as a world leading research centre focussing on spatial data infrastructures (SDI), geospatial intelligence and geoinformatics.
The Centre has a strong team of post-doctoral researchers and PhD students funded through contracts from the UK Research Councils, Government bodies, the European Commission and industry. Mike and CGS researchers sit on multiple national and international Committees and scientific boards and CGS hosts an open source geospatial laboratory with a successful annual Conference. The Centre publishes widely in both the scientific and more popular press.
Mike said, “Setting-up and running CGS has been a great experience. Thanks to the outstanding research staff that CGS was able to attract it rapidly gained a reputation as a geospatial ‘Centre of Excellence’. It has been a real privilege to work with so many outstanding people both within the Centre and with our research partners elsewhere in the UK and across the World. The Centre has a vibrant funded research portfolio and with Jeremy and the current research team has a great future ahead of it.”
Mike will return on a part-time basis from September and will continue in many of his other roles including being Chair of AGILE and a Board Member and Director of the Open Geospatial Consortium.
Jeremy Morley started as Deputy Director of CGS in September 2009 following a move to the University of Nottingham from University College London. Jeremy is the Chair of this year’s AGI GeoCommunity conference in September, the UK academic representative to EuroSDR and a member of the UK Location Programme’s User Group.
Jeremy said, “The Centre for Geospatial Science was created through Mike’s vision and his leadership has been enormously successful in building CGS into a dynamic, internationally recognised geospatial research centre. I’m honoured to take on the role of Director of CGS to continue and build on Mike’s creation. I’m also pleased to welcome Mike back to continue working with CGS from September.”
Further information about CGS can be found at http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/cgs
