David Plane has been awarded the 2020 edition of the Hirotada Kohno award. The decision was made by the Jury comprising Mark Partridge (President); Serena Erendira (Council member); Andrés Rodrigues-Pose and Yoshiro Higano (RSAI Past Presidents), which I would like to thank for their service despite these troubled times.

The Hirotada Kohno award is bestowed to eminent regional scientists for their outstanding professional service to our discipline, and this description perfectly fits Prof. Plane’s.

In fact, David A. Plane, a Professor Emeritus of the University of Arizona, has been a lifetime contributor to regional science. His research focuses on population geography and regional science, U.S. migration and settlement patterns, the role of the life course in affecting mobility, and methods for modeling activity patterns and temporal change in spatial interaction systems.

Prof. Plane was elected as a Fellow of the Regional Science Association International (RSAI) in 2010. He has served as President and Chair of the North American Regional Science Council (NARSC); President of the Pacific Regional Science Conference Organization (PRSCO); Editor-in-Chief of Papers in Regional Science (PiRS) and Co-Managing Editor of the Journal of Regional Science (JRS); as well as numerous panels and committees for the National Science Foundation, the National Academies, and the U.S. Most importantly, David Plane had been leading the Western Regional Science Association of NARSC as the executive director for 21 years between 1991 and 2011, served as the 57th president for WRSA and elected as a fellow in 2011. For over two decades, David Plane had been the main driving force for the continuing growth of WRSA. He had focused on maintaining the quality of scholarly interaction among regional scientists through the annual meetings of the WRSA. Since 1998, he has been serving as a councillor for PRSCO, which was founded by WRSA and JSRSA (Japan Section of the Regional Science Association) in 1968.