ASU professor recognized with Distinguished Scholarship Honors

Stewart Fotheringham to receive award from the American Association of Geographers

Stewart Fotheringham is a Regents' Professor in the School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning.

By Megan Martin |
December 14, 2018

Less than a month after being named Regents’ Professor, the highest honor bestowed to faculty at Arizona State University, Stewart Fotheringham has another honor to add to his list of acclaims. The American Association of Geographers has announced their 2019 honors, including special recognition for Fotheringham with the Distinguished Scholarship Honors.

A professor of spatial science and geographic information science (GIS) at ASU’s School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning, Fotheringham is considered among the world’s foremost experts in the field. Among his extensive list of contributions includes the creation of geographically weighted regression, considered one of the most important breakthroughs in GIS, which allows for analysis of some of society’s most pressing problems.

According to the AAG, Fotheringham was selected for the 2019 AAG Distinguished Scholarship Honors “for his pioneering and novel methodological innovations in spatial analysis, consistent and continuous commitment to the dissemination of new techniques and empirical findings, deep and enduring impact on theoretical and applied literature in geography and his achievements in scholarly and professional domains across the academy.”

Beyond this most recent award and earning his Regents’ Professor distinction, Fotheringham was inducted into Academia Europaea and named the director of ASU’s Spatial Analysis Research Center in 2017, in addition to his positions as a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the U.K. Academy of Social Sciences.

"It's a tremendous honor to be recognized by the American Association of Geographers, especially as the association represents such an extremely broad spectrum of scholars and subject matter," Fotheringham said.

Fotheringham says the future remains bright for GIS and spatial analyis.

"With the advent of huge volumes of spatial data being made available, there has never been such a demand for geographers who can make sense of these data in order for us to make more informed decisions,” he said. “The bottleneck is no longer in spatial data collection; it is in spatial data analysis.”

Fotheringham will receive his award during the 2019 AAG Annual Meeting in April.