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2011 AAG Honors Recipients Citation
(AAG Newsletter, February 2011, p.6)


Mei-Po Kwan, Distinguished Professor of Social and Behavioral Sciences at the Ohio State University, will receive AAG Distinguished Scholarship Honors in recognition of her pioneering scholarship in spatial behavior studies that fuse quantitative and qualitative methods from transportation geography, critical social theory, feminist geography, and geographic information science. Her work enriches these specialty areas with hybrid mixed method approaches to gain a deeper understanding of the space-time constraints in shaping the geographies of everyday life, and the impacts of information and communication technologies on urban forms, urban travel, and spatial interaction. Kwan incorporates feminist/critical epistemologies into GIS methodology to link macro geographies, local context, and gender perspectives. Her innovative research extends beyond traditional disciplinary boundaries and pushes for interdisciplinarity and geographies of health that integrate spatial behavior into the study of population and health. Professor Kwan’s role as Editor of the Annals of the AAG (Methods, Models, and Geographic Information Science Section) has significantly elevated the quality and quantity of publications in these subject areas. The breadth and depth of her scholarship has helped to substantially transform geographic research and the reputation of our discipline, and her outstanding scholarship has exemplified the ideas of significant and distinguished scholarship in geography.