AAG Scholarship Honors Awards are among the most prestigious awards in American geography and have been awarded since 1951. They are offered annually to recognize outstanding accomplishments by members in research and scholarship, teaching, education, service to the discipline, public service outside academe and for lifetime achievement. Mei-Po Kwan is the recipient of this year’s Association of American Geographers (AAG) Distinguished Scholarship Honors Award “in recognition of her pioneering scholarship in spatial behavior studies that fuse quantitative and qualitative methods from transportation geography, critical social theory, feminist geography, and geographic information science.”
Mei-Po’s Honors Recipients Citation goes on to state: “Her work enriches these specialty areas with hybrid mixed method approaches to gain a deeper understanding of the space-time constraints in shaping the geographies of everyday life, and the impacts of information and communication technologies on urban forms, urban travel, and spatial interaction. Kwan incorporates feminist/critical epistemologies into GIS methodology to link macro geographies, local context, and gender perspectives. Her innovative research extends beyond traditional disciplinary boundaries and pushes for interdisciplinarity and geographies of health that integrate spatial behavior into the study of population and health. Professor Kwan’s role as Editor of the Annals of the AAG (Methods, Models, and Geographic Information Science Section) has significantly elevated the quality and quantity of publications in these subject areas. The breadth and depth of her scholarship has helped to substantially transform geographic research and the reputation of our discipline, and her outstanding scholarship has exemplified the ideas of significant and distinguished scholarship in geography.”
Mei-Po received her doctorate from the UCSB Department of Geography in 1994. Reg Golledge, the Chair of her PhD committee, considered her to be one of the finest students he ever taught, and the two of them collaborated on numerous projects and articles over the years. Among her many notable achievements, Dr. Kwan is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science; a Distinguished Professor of Social and Behavioral Sciences and Dr. Martha L. Corry Faculty Fellow, Department of Geography, The Ohio State University; the Director of the Geographical Analysis Core Initiative in Population Research (IPR), The Ohio State University; an Adjunct Professor of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, School of Medicine, Case Western Reserve University; the Editor of the Annals of the Association of American Geographers; and the Associate Editor of Geographical Analysis.
