James Cheshire is Professor of Geographic Information and Cartography in the UCL Department of Geography and Director of the UCL Q-Step Centre.  He is co-author of the critically acclaimed books London: The Information Capital and Where the Animals Go. James is the recipient of a number of major awards from the Royal Geographical Society, The North American Cartographic Information Society and British Cartographic Society. He was President of the Society of Cartographers between 2017 and 2019.

James completed a BSc (1st Class Hons.) in Physical Geography at the University of Southampton before undertaking a PhD in GIScience at the UCL Department of Geography. His topic was the spatial analysis and visualisation of large surname databases. After completing his PhD he was appointed Lecturer in Advanced Spatial Analysis and Visualisation at CASA before moving to the UCL Department of Geography where he became Associate Professor of Quantitative Human Geography before promotion to full professor in 2019.