Nigel Waters is Professor Emeritus of Geography at the University of Calgary, where he previously served as professor from 1975 to 1999. In 1999 he was apointed the Founding Director of the Masterss in GIS Program. From 2007-2014 he was appointed professor and director of the George Mason University Center of Excellence for Geographic Information Science, and is currently an affiliate faculty member of Mason's College of Science.

Prof. Waters has published extensively in the peer reviewed literature on the application of GIScience in transportation, medical geography, environmental science, spatial statistics and related areas. He is the former President of the Western Canadian Association of Geographers; 1989-2014, Associate Editor of GeoWorld (previously GIS World) contributing the Edge Nodes column; 2014 co-edited Data Mining for Geoinformatics: Methods and Applications; and 2011-2014 Editor of Cartographica: The International Journal for Geographic Information and Geovisualization. He has received numerous awards for his work, including the Award of Distinction, Canadian Cartographic Association (2014); the Inaugural Award from the GIScience Study Group of the Canadian Association of Geographers for Lifetime Achievement and GIScience Excellence (2015); and the 2019 Schulich School of Engineering, University of Calgary, Distinguished Collaborator Award.

In 2018 he published on the History of GIS and Tobler’s First Law of Geography in the International Encyclopedia of Geography (IEG), with references to other “first laws” including Criminology. His most recent publications include in press articles (2020) on Microtargeting (IEG) and Motivations and Methods for Replication in Geography: Working with Data Streams, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, that paper reviews the replication crisis in Criminology, Geography and other disciplines. He has served on graduate advisory committees in the Center for Evidenced-Based Crime Policy.