Geography & Earth Sciences Faculty Member Receives National Award

UNC Charlotte faculty member Jean-Claude Thill has received the Hirotada Kohno Award for outstanding service to the Regional Science Association International.

Thill is the Knight Distinguished Knight Distinguished Professor of Public Policy in the Department of Geography & Earth Sciences in the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences. He will take office as president of RSAI next year and has long supported the organization in its efforts to exchange ideas and research within regional science throughout the world.

The award honors an organization member who has provided long and outstanding service to the development and organization of regional science. The award guidelines also require service that extends beyond the local level and incorporates international service.

“Jean-Claude Thill is an internationally recognized scholar in the fields of geography and regional science,” said Craig Allan, chair of the Department of Geography & Earth Sciences. “His service to his discipline and to graduate student mentoring is outstanding, as evidenced by how his students in the Ph.D. programs in Geography and Regional and Urban Analysis, Public Policy and Infrastructure and Environmental Systems are publishing in top journals and have been repeatedly recognized at international meetings for their scholarly achievements.”

Thill’s current research interests relate to the two broad themes of transportation and mobility systems and spatial knowledge discovery. In the areas of transportation and mobility systems, his recent research has considered the dynamic processes of urbanization and the social, economic, and environmental sustainability of the urban settlements that result. In spatial analysis, his work has focused on spatial autocorrelation patterns in vectoral data and data mining.

Prior to joining UNC Charlotte in 2006, Thill was a professor in the Department of Geography at the University at Buffalo, The State University of New York. He previously was affiliated with the University of Georgia. He received his doctoral, Master of Science and Bachelor of Science degrees from Université Catholique de Louvain in Belgium.

He is Editor-in-Chief of Computers, Environment and Urban Systems, Area Editor in charge of Geographic Information Science of Networks and Spatial Economics, and Associate Editor of Geographical Analysis. He also serves on the editorial boards of several other regional, national, and international journals of geography, regional science, and spatial systems.

From 1996 to 2002, he was the North American Editor of Papers in Regional Science, the Journal of the Regional Science Association International. He is Executive Director of the North American Regional Science Council. He is involved in the Center for Transportation Policy Studies as an Assistant Director, the Infrastructure, Design, Environment and Sustainability (IDEAS) Center, and the Center for Applied GIScience.

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.