UCSB Geography alumna Mei-Po Kwan (PhD 1994; Golledge, Committee Chair) and alumnus Sergio Rey (PhD 1994; Anselin, Committee Chair) each received the 2015 Outstanding Service Award from the Association of American Geographers (AAG) Spatial Analysis and Modeling (SAM) Specialty Group. Li An, the SAM Chair and a professor at San Diego State University congratulated them as follows:
“Congratulations to Drs. Mei-Po Kwan from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Dr. Sergio Rey from Arizona State University, who have been selected to be recipients of the 2015 Outstanding Service Award! This very prestigious award is annually given to individuals who have substantially contributed to the SAM group through outstanding service, including excellence in promoting the awareness and reputation of the SAM group as well as exceptional research and outreach activities that render the general public or researchers from other disciplines to accept / use spatial analysis and modeling theories or techniques” (source: email from Li An, forwarded by Mei-Po Kwan). The AAG Honors will be presented at the upcoming AAG Annual Meeting in Chicago, IL, during a special awards luncheon on Saturday, April 25, 2015.
The mission of the SAM specialty group is “to foster and maintain interaction, cooperation, and community among individuals interested in the analysis of geo-referenced data, modeling of spatio-temporal processes and the use of analytical and computational techniques in solving geographic problems. The specialty group promotes the scientific study of physical, environmental and socioeconomic geography and the development, use and teaching of analytical cartography, geographic information systems (GIS), remote sensing, and spatial, statistical, mathematical, and computational techniques for spatial analysis” (source).
