Anson W. Mackay
Anson W. Mackay (born 1967) is a Scottish scientist and emeritus Professor of Geography at University College London. They retired in April 2022 because of ill health. Their work focuses on how climate change affects freshwater ecosystems.
Mackay grew up in Tongue, a village on Scotland’s north coast, and were born to crofters. They studied Biological Science at the University of Edinburgh, graduating in 1989, and earned a PhD in palaeoecology from the University of Manchester in 1993. They later became a Leverhulme fellow at UCL.
They came out as gay at Edinburgh and began a relationship with David Adger, who they are still with. Since 2022 they identify as non-binary. They enjoy running marathons and ultramarathons, even while living with stage-4 HPV-related cancer.
Mackay joined UCL as a lecturer in 2000 and was promoted to Professor in 2013. They have studied pollution and climate change impacts on Lake Baikal, the Aral Sea, and the Okavango Delta, and reconstructed Baikal’s climate history for about 800,000 years. Lake Baikal is the deepest and oldest lake, holding a large share of the world’s freshwater and many species found nowhere else.
Their diatom research shows how warming and pollution affect the tiny algae at the base of the food web, using silicon isotopes to track changes. They argue that water quality has declined due to inadequate sewage treatment and pollution from the Baikal Paper and Pulp Mill.
Mackay has received several honors, including the UCL Inclusion Awards (Inspiring Role Model and Inspirational Engagement) in 2022 and the Royal Geographical Society’s Victoria Medal in 2023 for transforming geography. They have written for The Conversation and helped found Out Geography, an LGBTQ+ network at UCL, in 2017. They are part of the 500 Queer Scientists network and contributed to a parliamentary inquiry on science funding, equality and diversity.
Selected book: Global Change in the Holocene (Routledge, 2014).
This page was last edited on 3 February 2026, at 18:33 (CET).