Award of Stan Czamanski Prize in 2015

by David Boyce, Kieran Donaghy and Rachel Franklin

In mid-October, 2015, our committee met by telephone to recommend the winner of the 2015 award of the Stan Czamanski Prize for the best Ph.D. dissertation proposal approved during the period July 1, 2014 to June 30, 2015. The six candidates for this award were the following:

Steven R. Gehrke, PortlandStateUniversity, Portland, Oregon, USA

Sarah Howe, RMIT University, Victoria, Australia

Victor Iturra Rivera, The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio, USA

Dávid Krisztián Nagy, PrincetonUniversity, Princeton, New Jersey, USA

Natalya Rybnikova, University of Haifa, Haifa, Israel

Samuel Stehle, PennStateUniversity, University Park, Pennsylvania, USA

One other candidate by Xize Wang, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, California, USA, was submitted early for the 2016 competition. He was asked to resubmit his documents in June 2016. Finally, one additional candidate, Hyun Kim, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, Wisconsin, USA, was submitted on September 30, 2015. This submission was not judged in the 2015 competition.

In reviewing the six submissions, the following statement was carefully considered:

“Professor Czamanski’s research exemplified the analysis of social problems with regional and spatial dimensions. In doing so, he chose judiciously the right combination of analytical and empirical research methods from his tool box to address the specific issue at hand. Many of his papers illustrated how particular combinations of methods could be used most aptly to study particular problems.”

In our review, we agreed unanimously that the proposal of Steven Gehrke best represented the approach of Professor Czamanski. Gehrke’s proposal was entitled “Active Travel Behavior and Spatial-temporalLand Use Mixing.” The letter by Professor Kelly Clifton was helpful in reaching this conclusion.