Colonel Robert Kearsley Dawson CB (1798 – 1861) was an English surveyor and cartographer of the Corps of Royal Engineers.

[2] He studied at the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich.

[2] Dawson was commissioned in the Corps of Royal Engineers as 2nd Lieutenant on 1 March 1816, and between 1819 and 1829 took part in the triangulation and mapping of Ireland and Scotland under Thomas Colby.

[3] In 1831, he was recalled to England to survey the boundaries of the proposed Parliamentary Boroughs for the Great Reform Act, producing a series of one-inch and two-inch maps that are preserved in two volumes in the British Library.

He died at Lee Grove, Blackheath, London, on 28 March 1861.