Dr. Brian Berry

Dr. Brian Berry

Dr. Brian Berry, Lloyd Viel Berkner Regental Professor and former dean of the School of Economic, Political and Policy Sciences, has received two recent honors – one from an international scholarly society and another from his alma mater, the University of Washington.

Berry was elected a 2012 fellow of the Regional Science Association International, which is a cohort of scholars focused on economics and global processes. Members of the association nominate distinguished scholars for the honor. Berry was one of four elected this year.

“I was one of the earliest members of the original Regional Science Association and have been closely associated with the multidisciplinary field ever since,” Berry said.

In 1966, he was the association’s vice president, and has served on the editorial board of the Journal of Regional Science. In 2007, he received the Walter Isard Award from the association’s North American Council.

Berry also recently received the “Timeless Award” from the University of Washington, where he earned his master’s and doctoral degrees.

The award was given as part of the school’s 150th anniversary celebration, which included honoring distinguished alumni and a lecture series featuring prominent scientists, authors and public figures.

“My wife and I traveled to Seattle for the 150th anniversary event when each of UW’s living recipients of their distinguished alumnus award was honored once again,” Berry said. “This was a particularly satisfying visit since it was in my graduate student days in the early 1950s at the UW that we took the first steps to drag an often-protesting field of geography into the world of modern theoretical-quantitative social science.”

Berry has been a member of UT Dallas’ faculty since 1986. In 1975, he was the youngest social scientist ever elected to the National Academy of Sciences.  In 2005, he was named the Laureat Vautrin Lud – the highest honor given in the field of geography. He was dean of the School of Economic, Political and Policy Sciences from 2005 to 2010.