Mark S. Nixon is an author, researcher, editor and an academic. He is the former president of IEEE Biometrics Council, and former vice-Chair of IEEE PSPB. He retired from his position as Professor of Electronics and Computer Science at University of Southampton in 2019. Nixon’s main research interests include using gait and ear as biometrics and using soft biometrics for identification. He has served the International Association for Pattern Recognition (IAPR) in several offices. Nixon has authored 4 books including Feature Extraction and Image Processing for Computer Vision , Human Identification based on Gait and Introductory Digital Design. He has around 20,000 citations. Nixon became a BMVA Distinguished Fellow in 2015. He is a Fellow of the International Association of Pattern Recognition. Education Nixon graduated from University of Reading in BSc Cybernetics Science with Subsidiary Mathematics in 1979. He completed his doctoral studies in Applied Estimation Theory from the same university in 1983. Career Nixon joined University of Southampton in 1983 and became a Professor of Electronics and Computer Science; he was awarded Personal Chair in 2001 and retired in 2019. Nixon has held several leadership and management positions over the course of his career. He was appointed as President of the IEEE Biometrics Council from 2017 to 2018. He was appointed as Chair of the International Association of Pattern Recognition (IAPR), while also serving as member of Nominating Committee and Advisory Committee. He has been serving as the vice-Chair IEEE PSPB since 2018. He is an advisory editor for Pattern Recognition Letters. Research Nixon’s research on biometrics and computer science has continued nearly 40 years, pioneering human gait as a biometric and joining the pioneers of the use of ears in biometrics. In his initial work with face recognition, his team applied new techniques for shape extraction and description and more recently formulated them for moving objects. This research is also applied to medical imagery and in remotely–sensed image analysis. Nixon’s research approaches operate on spatial images, video and in 3D. Nixon's later research was focused on mechanisms that seek to cross the semantic gap and to learn human descriptions from computer vision features and conversely to learn image features from human descriptions; also using soft biometrics where the use of human descriptions for biometrics purpose is pioneered. In the recent years, Nixon and his team have described how subjects can be recognized by human descriptions (attributes) of their