Danny is currently a Professor of Human Geography at the University of Sheffield.

Danny Dorling was educated at The University of Newcastle upon Tyne in Geography, Mathematics and Statistics leading to a PhD in the Visualization of Spatial Social Structure (1991). He continued studying in Social Science at Newcastle as a Joseph Rowntree Foundation and British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow before moving to the University of Bristol to teach Geography there, next being appointed to a Chair of Quantitative Human Geography at the University of Leeds.

Since 2003 he has been a Professor of Human Geography in the University of Sheffield. He is also Adjunct Professor in the Department of Geography, University of Canterbury, NZ, and Visiting Professor in the Department of Social Medicine, University of Bristol, UK.

In 2003 Danny was awarded a Philip Leverhulme Prize for outstanding scholarship and was appointed an Academician of the Academy of the Learned Societies in the Social Sciences, and in 2004 he was awarded an Erskine Fellowship to undertake a sabbatical at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand, in spring 2005.

In 2006 he was awarded a British Academy Research Leave Fellowship, to study the transformation of social inequality in the United Kingdom: 1945-2005. In 2007 he was awarded a Leverhulme Study Abroad Fellowship to work on understanding the current transformation of inequality internationally in the rich world.

In 2008 he was appointed Honorary President of the Society of Cartographers.

Danny is an advisor on the Mapping Needs project.