Rate My Professor Andrew Tatem

Professor Andrew Tatem is Professor of Spatial Demography and Epidemiology and holds a Personal Chair at the University of Southampton, where he serves as Director of the WorldPop research group. He completed his PhD at the University of Southampton in the Department of Electronics, focusing on approaches for sub-pixel land cover mapping from satellite imagery. In 2002, he joined the Department of Zoology at the University of Oxford as a Research Officer, where he developed demographic and disease datasets and contributed to the initiation of the Malaria Atlas Project through work with the Kenya Medical Research Institute in Nairobi. In 2009, he took up a faculty position at the Emerging Pathogens Institute and Department of Geography at the University of Florida, during which he founded WorldPop and conducted research on population mobility and its implications for malaria transmission and elimination.

In 2013, Professor Tatem returned to the University of Southampton as Professor in the Department of Geography and Environment. His research focuses on developing high-resolution approaches to map population distributions, demographics, and dynamics by integrating satellite imagery, mobile phone data, surveys, and census information, with applications in disease modeling, disaster response, and development planning in low- and middle-income countries. He leads international collaborations with governments, UN agencies, and organizations including the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Wellcome Trust, World Bank, and GAVI. Professor Tatem has authored more than 300 publications cited over 40,000 times and has received awards from the Royal Geographical Society, the Academy of Social Sciences, and the United Nations. He was appointed as an expert on big data, machine learning, and AI to the UK Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office Research Advisory Group in 2024.