[3] Ros Atkins was born in 1974 and grew up in Stithians, Cornwall but also lived in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago and Nassau, Bahamas.

[6][7] Atkins began his career in South Africa where he researched crime prevention and human rights for the Centre for Policy Studies.

[3] Atkins continued to DJ, setting up a night at the Brixtonian Havana Club called Sharp in Brixton, south London, and appearing at WOMAD and Fruitstock.

[11] Atkins has hosted coverage of many major stories around the world for BBC News, including both of Barack Obama's election victories and his first inauguration, the swine flu outbreak in Mexico, the football World Cups in Germany and South Africa, the Charles Taylor verdict, the London Olympic Games and the Diamond Jubilee of Elizabeth II celebrations.

[3][12][13] He was also a lead presenter for the BBC World Service coverage of the death of Nelson Mandela that won a Radio Academy Gold Award in 2014.

[14][15][13] Atkins also hosted live audience radio programmes for BBC World Service in many places including Cleveland, Austin, Los Angeles, Windhoek, Delhi, Mumbai, Kampala, Nairobi, Accra, Abuja, Berlin, Brussels, Tel Aviv, Jakarta, Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Cardiff, Glasgow and many more.

All That Stands in the Way looked at the root causes of gender inequality through the lives of four teenage girls from Iceland, Jordan, the UK and Lesotho.

In March 2019, Atkins presented a six-part podcast for the BBC exploring his unconventional friendship with American broadcaster Keith Olbermann.

These have covered topics from COVID, Partygate which went viral, to 2021 Abu Dhabi Grand Prix, Iran protests, Brexit and the UK economy and Hu Jintao's puzzling China Congress exit.

[25] Its aim is to increase the representation of women in media content, and it began as an experiment on Atkins' programme Outside Source in early 2017.

Atkins created a voluntary system of self-monitoring which has since been adopted by hundreds of BBC teams across genres including news, sport, entertainment and factual.