Professor Richard Church has just been elected a Fellow of the Regional Science Association International. RSAI has an international membership of over 3,000, more than one third of whom are Europeans. According to its web site, “Founded in 1954, RSAI is an international community of scholars interested in the regional impacts of national or global processes of economic and social change. The work of RSAI draws on the expertise of many different disciplines and this multi-disciplinary approach helps to facilitate new theoretical insights for tackling regional problems. In turn, this provides an increasing opportunity for academics within the Association to engage more fully with planners and policy makers. Building on a strong foundation of quantitative methods, regional science is at the cutting edge of research into new model design for regional analysis and impact assessment. The Association fosters the exchange of ideas and research within regional science through its publications and the international scientific conferences it hosts.”
The RSAI Fellows Award was initiated in 2001 “to honor a select group of members of the Association who have made important scholarly and research contributions to the field of regional science.” Dr. Church is one of only 50 recipients of this prestigious award to date; he will receive his award at the November 2009 annual meeting of The North American Regional Science Council (a supranational section of RSAI) in San Francisco. Professor Reg Golledge is the only other RSAI Fellow at UCSB; other Fellows in the field of Geography include Luc Anselin (Arizona State University), Arthur Getus (San Diego State University), Manfred Fischer (Vienna University of Economics and Business Administration, Austria), Yorgos Papageorgiou (McMaster University, Canada), T. R. Lakshmanan (Boston University), and Antoine Bailly (Université de Genève, Switzerland).
