Arthur Getis is to receive the Founder’s Medal of the Regional Science Association International (RSAI) at the RSAI World Congress in Timisoara, Romania, on May 9. The award is for “a senior scholar who has contributed to the field of Regional Science in an important way, and a person who has been active in RSAI over a sustained period of time.”
RSAI is a scholarly organization founded in 1954 by Walter Isard, who taught at the University of Pennsylvania , Harvard, and Cornell. Today, there are about 7000 members organized in three supra-regional groups (North America, Europe, and the Pacific) containing over 30 country and regional organizations. All of these groups conduct yearly academic meetings that cover social, economic, political, and behavioral phenomena with a spatial dimension. In 1978, RSAI honored Professor Isard by establishing the Founder’s Medal. Since that time, every four years, at the World Congress of RSAI, a scholar is awarded the Founder’s Medal. Those who previously were presented with the Founder’s Medal include Walter Isard, Martin J. Beckmann (Brown), William Alonso (Harvard), Jean H.P. Paelinck (Erasmus), David E. Boyce (Illinois-Chicago), Peter Nijkamp (Free University), and Antoine Bailly (Geneva).
Getis is currently an Emeritus Professor of Geography at San Diego State University who officially retired in 2004, but he still continues to pursue research in his areas of specialization, namely spatial statistics, pattern analysis, urban geography, disease and crime clustering, and geographic information sciences. He joined SDSU as a visiting distinguished professor in 1989, served as the SDSU-UCSB Geography Department’s Doctoral Program Coordinator, 1990-1992, and held the Stephen and Mary Birch Foundation Endowed Chair of Geographical Studies 1992-2004.
