Professor Rick Church has just been elected to the Board of Directors of the Western Regional Science Association (WRSA). Founded in 1961, the WRSA is an international multidisciplinary group of university scholars and government and private-sector practitioners dedicated to the scientific analysis of regions. WRSA organizes an annual conference and provides awards for graduate students working in the field of regional science. The WRSA publishes the Annals of Regional Science, a scholarly, peer-reviewed, journal that promotes high quality scholarship on the important theoretical and empirical issues in regional science. The journal publishes papers which make substantial contributions to the body of knowledge in which the spatial dimension plays a fundamental role.
Professor Church joined the UCSB Department of Geography in 1980 and served as its Chair 1984-1988. He has published over 180 papers and research reports in a variety of fields, including Geography, Transportation, Location Science, Environmental Engineering, Operations Research, and Water Resources. In 2009, he was elected a Fellow of the Regional Science Association International and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and in 2010 he was appointed Associate Dean of the UCSB Division of Mathematical, Life, and Physical Sciences (MLPS), part of the UCSB College of Letters and Science.
