Jouke van Dijk wins prestigious Hirotada Kohno Award for Outstanding Service for the RSAI

Jouke van Dijk is the winner of the Hirotada Kohno Award for Outstanding Service to Regional Science of the Regional Science Association International (RSAI). The prize is awarded annually to a member of the RSAI who has made long and outstanding contributions to the organization of Regional Science and to the development and management of RSAI at the International and/or Supra-Regional, including an outstanding contribution to the development of Regional Science at the Local Section level.

Van Dijk is professor of Regional Labor Market Analysis at the Faculty of Spatial Sciences of the University of Groningen. He started his involvement with RSAI at the Dutch branch, where he was co-organizer of ERSA (European Regional Science Association) meetings in Groningen in 1982, 1994 and 2017. In the 1990s he was executive secretary of the Dutch branch. From 1996 to 2001, he was Executive Secretary of ERSA and the European Organizing Committee (EOC), of which he remained a member until 2019. From 2014 to 2018, Jouke van Dijk was president of the European Regional Science Association (ERSA).

In addition to his positions at ERSA/RSAI, he also had editorial roles. He was Editor-in-Chief of the Papers in Regional Science from 2007 to 2012, before that he was the European Editor of Papers in Regional Science for two years. In 2012, he was named one of the editors of the Springer Regional Science Series Advances in Spatial Science.

In 2020, Van Dijk was elected RSAI Fellow of the Regional Science Association International as a 'distinguished scholar with a proven and recognized research record in the field of regional science'.