My first exposure to Regional Science was through my late uncle, Marcel Anselin, who was an economics and planning professor at the University of Ghent in Belgium. I was an undergraduate in economics at the Free University of Brussels (the VUB) and he and my aunt would have me over to their place in Provence during the summer. Over dinner (and wine) he would talk about his participation in the European Regional Science conferences and meeting early visionaries such as Walter Isard, Thomas Reiner and John Dyckman. I was hooked. After my undergraduate work (1975), I completed a masters degree in Econometrics, Operations Research and Statistics at the VUB (1976) and also did some graduate work in my uncle’s regional planning program in Ghent. By then, I had a position as a research associate in the Center for Demography at the VUB run by Ron Lesthaeghe, where I worked on a model that integrated long term economic and demographic trends, coincidentally also the topic of my undergraduate thesis. At the time (1977), the prospects for an academic career in Belgium were pretty dismal, so I was encouraged by my uncle and my undergraduate mentors (including Herbert Glejser, a well-known econometrician) to pursue further graduate work in the U.S. My uncle had (nearly identical looking) flyers from the Cornell and Penn Regional Science programs. I applied and was admitted to both to study under Isard, who was affiliated with both places. It was a difficult choice, but my decision was made easy by a call from Isard to my parents’ home encouraging me to pick Cornell. As it turned out, Isard moved there full time the next year. Anselin receives the Alonso prize from Koichi Mera As part of my research in the Center for Demography, I had become interested in cross-sectional econometric analysis and in the problem of “spatial autocorrelation.” In the 1970s, economic time series tended to be short and Belgium had good data at the level of the “arrondissements” so that a cross-sectional (or pooled time-series cross-sectional) perspective was very attractive. This brought me to the early work in spatial econometrics by the Dutch regional economists Paelinck, Kuipers and Hordijk and the UK statisticians and geographers Ord, Ripley and Cliff. This is what I wanted to pursue for my dissertation. Of course, what I did not realize is that at Cornell nobody was really interested in this topic, let alone did work on it. I had a very hard time convincing Isard that this could be turned into a dissertation, as his initial reaction was to dismiss spatial dependence as a “red herring” (not knowing what this was, I had to look it up). Eventually, he agreed that I could pursue it, as long as I also worked on integrated multiregional models, which I did. I also had Bill Greene on my dissertation committee, to make sure that what I did was legitimate econometrics. At Cornell, I did not take many courses, but had several intense independent studies with Isard and Stan Czamanski, who was also on my committee. In summer 1980, Isard organized the first World Regional Science and Peace Science Congress in Cambridge (MA) and had me attend (for two weeks!) as a rapporteur. It was a great opportunity to meet the leading and up and coming regional scientists, such as Bill Alonso (I had written a paper on his general theory of movement, which became my first publication, co-authored with Isard), Geoff Hewings, David Boyce, Peter Batey and the late Moss Madden, among others (I would later co-edit a book with Moss). Luc Anselin with Walter Isard In addition to being a valued advisor and a great role model, Stan Czamanski was also instrumental in helping me get my first academic position. His son, Dan Czamanski was a faculty in City and Regional Planning at Ohio State and I was encouraged to apply for a position. I joined the department in Fall of 1980. At Ohio State, there was a small informal Regional Science group with Czamanski, Larry Brown and Emilio Casetti among others, which made for a very stimulating intellectual environment. I continued to work on integrated multiregional modeling. I also continued to work on the specification of spatial interaction models, which resulted in my first NSF grant. However, very quickly, I returned to my original interest in spatial econometrics, specification tests and estimation methods. This further intensified after my move to UC Santa Barbara in 1985, where I joined the geography department. I received my second NSF grant, this time to work specifically on spatial econometric methods. At one of the North American RSA meetings, Peter Nijkamp encouraged me to consider compiling my papers into a book for the Kluwer Series in Operational Regional Science, of which he was the editor. This became my 1988 Spatial Econometrics book. I intended it to be more than simply a compilation of my earlier work, but set out to situate spatial econometric methods within econometrics as such, with a focus on the treatment of spat