How does one become a regional scientist? In my case my high school mathematics teacher in Uithoorn, the Netherlands, recommended that I should study something challenging like econometrics. Not having a strong preference for an alternative discipline, I followed his advice and enrolled in September 1972 in the Interfaculty of Econometrics and Actuarial Sciences at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (also referred to as VU University, or Free University Amsterdam). It was a small cohort, as they took in only the 30 best qualified applicants per year. It was called an Interfaculty because students were required to take core courses from the Faculty of Economics and from the Faculty of Science, as well as specialised courses in the Interfaculty itself. Thus, as an undergraduate student I had to struggle with topics like topology, measure theory and abstract algebra. The mathematical models used in undergraduate macroeconomics and microeconomics looked rather simple by comparison. I started my Masters in Econometrics at VU in January 1975 and had to choose between mathematical economics, econometrics and operations research. A strong interest in public policy led me to mathematical economics, where the work of Nobel Prize winner Jan Tinbergen – who I met when he was visiting VU – still strongly influenced the curriculum. My Masters supervisor Arnold Merkies had previously worked at the Dutch Central Planning Bureau (now called CPB Netherlands Bureau for Economic Policy Analysis) and offered me a research assistant position in 1976 to update and complete a study he had started at CPB on forecasting the long-run economic growth rate in the Netherlands under assumed scenarios of population growth and post-compulsory education enrolments. This introduced me not only to the economic growth theories at the time (and the inadequacy of the exogenous technological change assumption) but also to population projection methodologies and the use of Markov chains to model transitions. A seminar by Henri Theil, at the University of Chicago at the time, on modelling social mobility further inspired me to go in that direction. The Masters thesis was written in Dutch and sadly not subsequently published, but triggered a job as research assistant of the VU professors of economic growth and macroeconomic policy, Steven Huisman and Bernard Compaijen respectively. With them I contributed to a Dutch macroeconomics textbook. By late 1978 I decided to do a PhD abroad and a pamphlet on the VU noticeboard advertising a new PhD programme at Victoria University of Wellington (VUW) in New Zealand led me to apply. While at the opposite side of the world, New Zealand was not an odd choice for me as several of my relatives migrated there in the 1950s and I had visited them and hence knew the country. Additionally, my parents decided to retire there in the same year. VUW offered me a job as junior lecturer, which was financially more attractive than a scholarship offer I received in Australia. I also met my wife-to-be soon after arriving in Wellington, so that settled the location question. I decided on a PhD thesis on interregional population mobility, with labour economist Peter Brosnan as chief supervisor. Initially I started applying Markov chain models and could have gone in the direction of Andrei Rogers’ work, but became particularly intrigued by Bill Alonso’s general theory of movements. Formal econometric modelling of this model remained challenging for decades. I did design an estimation method and a New Zealand application, which was published in the Scottish Journal of Political Economy (a journal that had a tradition of publishing about labour markets and migration) in 1986. My introduction to the regional science network was through taking regional, urban and transportation economics as elective courses during my Masters at VU. That is how I met Peter Nijkamp and the late Piet Rietveld. In early 1980 I received a letter “out of the blue” from Peter Nijkamp, jointly with Wal van Lierop, inviting me to participate in a summer institute in Soesterberg, The Netherlands. There I presented my first regional science paper on analysing intra-urban residential mobility with log-linear models. The discussant was Peter Batey. Roughly at that time I also joined the Australian and New Zealand section of RSAI, which subsequently awarded me with the 1985 best PhD dissertation medal. Like many others in regional science, I continued to be active in other networks as well, in my case the New Zealand Demographic Society (now Population Association of NZ) and the NZ Association of Economists. Following completion of my doctorate in early 1984, my family and I went on sabbatical back to VU in Amsterdam and to the Australian National University in Canberra. In Amsterdam, I started my first project with Peter Nijkamp on dynamics of generalised spatial interaction models, subsequently published in 1987 Regional Science and Urban Economics. My first presentat