Antonio Páez, Ph.D., is currently Associate Professor (Tenured) at the School of Geography and Earth Sciences, McMaster University (Canada). Dr. Páez training is in civil engineering in Mexico (1993), followed by graduate degrees in spatial information science (1997) and regional planning in Japan (2001). He is affiliated with the Centre for Spatial Analysis and McMaster Institute for Transportation and Logistics, in addition to being associate member in the Department of Civil Engineering at McMaster University.
Dr. Páez was Visiting Research Professor in TRANSyT at Universidad Politecnica de Madrid in 2008, and has annually visited the Universidade de São Paulo for research and collaboration exchanges since 2008. He has been invited to teach and lecture on the topics of spatial analysis, transport modeling, and sustainability, at the Universidade de São Paulo, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Universidad Internacional Menéndez Pelayo, École Polytechnique de Montréal, and the University of Western Australia. As of 2011 he has given 48 invited presentations at various venues in North America, Europe, South America, and Australia.
In 2009, Dr. Páez led a multidisciplinary research team that was recognized with the 2010 Meredith F. Burrill Award of the Association of American Geographers, for work of exceptional merit and quality that lies at or near the intersection of basic research in geography on the one hand, and practical applications or policy implications on the other. The award was conferred to the project Mobility and Social Exclusion in Canadian Communities: An Empirical Investigation of Opportunity Access and Deprivation from the Perspective of Vulnerable Groups.
Dr. Páez has research interests in the fields of spatial analysis, transportation and land use, and travel behavior. His research has a strong geographical analytical flavor, and has placed a special emphasis on the formal study of the interactions and contextual variations between places and between people. He has brought spatial analytical approaches, mainly drawing from spatial statistical and social networks concepts, to bear on the study of the relationships between transportation infrastructure and land use, mobility and social exclusion, land values and housing prices, and locational decisions. As of 2011, he has authored or co-authored 55 papers that have been published in journals with international and multidisciplinary audiences, including International Regional Science Review, Papers in Regional Science, Environment and Planning A and B, Geographical Analysis, Journal of Geographical Systems, Urban Studies, Growth and Change, Journal of Transport Geography, Transportation, Transportation Research A, Transportation Research Record, and Social Networks.
In addition to his research endeavors, Dr. Páez has also been involved in editorial activities. He has guest-edited special issues for the Journal of Geographical Systems, Environment and Planning B, Papers in Regional Science, Transportation Research A and The Canadian Geographer, and currently is involved in the development of a special issue for Environment and Planning A. He serves as Editor-in-Chief for the Journal of Geographical Systems since 2008, having been invited to take on this role as Prof. Arthur Getis became Honorary Editor of the Journal, and sits in the Editorial Board of Environment and Planning A. He is also chief co-editor for the volume Progress in Spatial Analysis: Theory and Methods, and Thematic Applications, released in 2009 by Springer as part of its series Advances in Spatial Sciences.
His service includes being a member of the International Scientific Committee for the 3rd Spatial Econometrics World Congress in Barcelona (2009), organizing the Blood Donor Research Workshop in Hamilton (2009), and the Workshop Frontiers in Transportation: Social Interactions in Niagara-on-the-Lake (2009, 2011). He is Board Member of the Transportation Geography Specialty Group of the Association of American Geographers since 2010 and of the Transportation Research Board Standing Committee on Social and Economic Factors of Transportation since 2011. For the Regional Science Association International he coordinated the RSAI Dissertation Competition for the period between 2005-2007 (2005: 3 theses, 2006: 6 theses, 2007: 19 theses). For the North American Regional Science Council, he serves as member of the Stevens Graduate Fellowship Committee since 2010, and has organized sessions on Spatial Analysis of Urban Systems in 2005 (4 sessions), co-organized Spatial Statistics and Econometrics sessions in 2006 (9 sessions) and 2007 (15 sessions), and co-organized Accessibility Research sessions in 2008 (4 sessions).