Professor Lex Comber

Alexis Comber, Lex, is Professor of Spatial Data Analytics at Leeds Institute for Data Analytics (LIDA) the University of Leeds. He worked previously at the University of Leicester where he held a chair in Geographical Information Science. His first degree was in Plant and Crop Science at the University of Nottingham and he completed a PhD in Computer Science at the Macaulay Institute, Aberdeen (now the James Hutton Institute) and the University of Aberdeen developing expert systems for land cover monitoring. This brought him into the world of spatial data, spatial analysis, and mapping. Lex’s interests span many different application areas including land cover / land use, demographics, public health, agriculture, bio-energy and accessibility, all of which require multi-disciplinary approaches.

With the wider use of spatial data in other disciplines, Lex’s collaborations are increasingly with researchers in non-geographical domains. Recent examples include mental health, consumer analytics, market segment dynamics, bio-informatics and spatial transcriptomics. 

He has co-authored (with Chris Brunsdon) the first ‘how to book’ for spatial analyses and mapping in R the open source statistical software, An Introduction to R for Spatial Analysis and Mapping, now in its second edition. The follow on to this is Geographical Data Science and Spatial Data Analysis: and Introduction in R, was published in 2021

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