Manfred M. Fischer

I am Emeritus Professor of Economic Geography in the Department of SocioEconomics at Vienna University of Economics and Business, and Adjunct Professor in the Institute for Geographical Sciences and Natural Resources Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing. In 1975 I earned my doctorate in Geography and Mathematics from Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nuremberg, focusing on mathematical urban development models. From 1975 until 1988, I was successively Assistant and then Associate Professor at University of Vienna, where I received my habilitation degree in Social and Economic Geography for my research on a methodology of regional taxonomy. I worked for briefer periods at the Oskar Lange Academy in Wroclaw (Poland) and at the University of California Santa Barbara, before I became a Full Professor and Chair at the Vienna University of Economics and Business. As Chairman of the 500-person Commission on Mathematical Models of the International Geographical Union (1988-1996) I planned scholarly meetings in Canberra, Shanghai, Beijing, Prague, Bratislava, Odessa, The Hague, Boston, Washington, and Princeton, and helped developing research relations between members from different parts of the world. With Arthur Getis, the Secretary of the Commission, I joined forces to launch a new methodology publication outlet in 1993, the Journal of Geographical Systems [and its predecessor Geographical Systems] for which I am serving as one of its editors-in-chief. One of the distinctive features of this journal is its distinct focus on the interface between modelling, statistical techniques and spatial issues in a broad spectrum. My research activities are transdisciplinary in nature, crossing the boundaries of economic geography and regional science to economics, business economics, statistics and computational science, with a strong commitment to exploring and developing novel methods and techniques within spatial statistics and econometrics, and their application to a wide range of social science areas, most recently macroeconomics and finance. The outcome of my research has been published in international refereed journals, such as the Journal of Applied Econometrics, International Journal of Approximate Reasoning, Journal of Regional Science, Transactions in GIS, and Papers in Regional Science, but also in a great variety of books published by international publishers. Some of the books have been translated into Chinese.