Dr. Sergio Rey is awarded University Consortium for Geographic Information Science (UCGIS) Fellow in recognition of his advancement of research and community building within the geospatial ecosystem. He is the Founding Director of Center for Open Geographical Science and Professor in the Department of Geography at San Diego State University, following similar appointments at University of California at Riverside and Arizona State University.

His research contributions to GIScience can be organized broadly into three main themes: spatial econometrics and spatial data science, regional and local income dynamics, and open-source spatial science. His work in spatial econometrics has focused on the performance of specification tests in regression models, efficient specification searches, alternative model formulations, the treatment of spatial dependence in spatial Markov models, and more recently, efficient computation of spatial clustering algorithms, algorithms for high performance computing, and big (spatial) data analysis. His work in the area of regional and local income dynamics includes a focus on measurement, modeling and empirical analysis through the introduction of several innovative measures of regional convergence constructed from a spatial analytical perspective, such as spatial econometric approaches, new rank concordance indices, and Markov chain models, notably focused in recent work on neighborhood segregation and income inequities.

Over his career to date he has made significant contributions to making GIScience methods accessible through the development of open-source software tools, and his advocacy for open spatial science. This goes back to his early efforts on space-time analysis of regional systems, STARS, but his leadership role in Python based PySAL as an open-source library for spatial analysis is exceptional. PySAL has been downloaded nearly 3 million times by thousands of researchers and programmers in disciplines ranging from anthropology to zoology. PySAL is increasingly recognized as a critical tool to facilitate spatial analysis both in the open-source as well as in the commercial world, and is now included in the open-source scientific Python distributions by Enthought and Anaconda, and selected functionality is available as a plug-in for the popular Quantum GIS (QGIS) software. Commercially, both ESRI’s ArcGIS and the cloud-based web mapping service Carto have adopted PySAL plug-ins, thereby making its analytical functionality available to thousands of GIS users.

Complementing his distinguished research and community building activities has been his unwavering commitment to education of students and the research community as well as a range of disciplinary leadership roles, including as editor of two major journals (International Regional Science Review as well as Geographical Analysis). Noteworthy has been regular workshops devoted to the GIScience community, supporting the use, application and extension of PySAL for addressing a host of planning and policy issues. For his substantial contributions to the advancement of GIScience research, education, and academic community building, UCGIS is very pleased to name Dr. Sergio Rey as a UCGIS Fellow.