Malcolm Phillip Atkinson (born 13 October 1943, Cornwall, UK) is a professor of e-Science, in the University of Edinburgh School of Informatics.

[1] He was head of Department of Computing Science from 1986 to 1990, following which he spent nine months on sabbatical at INRIA near Paris working with the O2 group.

Atkinson then worked for Sun Microsystems (at SunLabs in California) before moving to the University of Edinburgh in 2001 as Professor in the School of Informatics.

Atkinson was the successful candidate and started his work as the e-Science Envoy on 1 April 2006 under EPSRC Grant No EP/D079829/1.

Its mission was to stimulate the creation of new insights in e-Science and computing science by bringing together international experts and enabling them to successfully address significant and diverse challenges.

Among Atkinson's best known achievements are his influential work[6] on Object-Oriented Database Systems, as presented in the Object-Oriented Database System Manifesto (with François Bancilhon, David DeWitt, Klaus Dittrich, David Maier, and Stanley Zdonik),[7] and his work designing OGSA-DAI,[8][9] a web-service platform for distributed data access, integration and management used internationally in scientific applications.

[10] In the early stages of his career, he worked closely with Carol Linden and Neil Wiseman on the Intermediate Data Language.

[17] He has been instrumental in setting up the XLDB-Europe series of satellite workshops which identify trends, commonalities and major roadblocks related to building eXtremely Large Data Bases (currently referring to databases whose size is 1 petabyte or greater).

She advised his parents that he had the potential to attend the University of Cambridge while young, and also reprimanded him for his early difficulties in writing.

He contracted rheumatic fever and was unable to attend school for a year during which time he read many science books.

They left Cambridge to start the department of Computer Science at the new Lancaster University and their first daughter, Kirsteen, was born there.