What will you do when you retire?

I’ve asked myself this question many times. There’s a natural rhythm to the academic year and to the professional activities of the teaching/research/service model expectations of the modern university.  I will miss this rhythm and now must replace it.

When I first came to Iowa as a graduate student in 1961, I was attracted by the theme that geography needed to have a new horizon with more prominence given to the development and testing of theory in economic geography.  Maybe there is a streak of stubbornness in me—in my high school in England, I was often called ‘stubborn Rush’—but I still believe in this theme.  I believe that geography is a vital discipline and the many problems this earth faces will need a more global view and a less nationalistic view, if they are to be solved. I expect to be around a while to see Iowa geography respond to this challenge.

After forty-nine years of teaching, research and service (seven years at McMaster University, Michigan State University and San Diego State University), I have the distinct pleasure of remembering intense discussions with the students I advised that will stay with me forever.  I will also remember the pleasures of working with colleagues both within and outside the department as the problems we tackled became bigger and the solutions more complex. I will not name them here, they know who they are and I thank them. There are two colleagues I will name because of the loss of their leaving unexpectedly from our group: Rex Honey by his untimely passing and Rebecca Roberts by her untimely departure. I miss them both.

In retirement I will enjoy the liberty of having a full-time “professional development leave” with time to pursue my interests and dreams, work in my garden, travel with Carolyn, and spend time with my family. I hope I can maintain and continue to develop many friendships and professional interests with Iowa Geography and beyond in my remaining years in Iowa City.

Comments from Former Students on Dr. Gerard Rushton

"It was a cold afternoon in the middle of December 1993.  Prof. Rushton and I, were sitting in his corner office and were working on a project, requested by the Iowa Department of Public Health, that aimed to examine the existence of birth defect clusters in Des Moines, IA.  The particular issue that we were facing at that particular day was to determine whether the birth defect clusters that had been mapped in earlier stages of the project were significant and not an outcome of a random process.  I told Prof. Rushton that, basically, there were two ways to tackle this problem.  One was to use main-stream statistics and make inferences at a predefined spatial aggregation level, noting that this approach, although easy and straight-forward to implement, would yield results that, probably, would be unsuitable or even useless for the case we have had at hand.  The alternative was to develop a new method, based on Monte Carlo simulations, that would enable us to determine the level of significance of the computed birth defect rates at any level of geographical aggregation.  However, that method, although scientifically sound and, as a research topic, very exciting, was computationally complex and, perhaps, impossible to develop and implement within the available time frame of the project and the available computer resources of that time.  Prof. Rushton, thought for a couple seconds and, said: “I think we should go the second way”.  How typical of Prof. Rushton!  This decision was the beginning of a very intense and extremely stressful effort to develop the method, fine tune its various aspects and write-up the necessary computer programs that would implement it.  The first simulation ran successfully on the eve of Christmas of 1993.  What an excitement!  We were able to see on a GIS, for the first time, not only the spatial distribution of birth defect rates at a very disaggregate level, but also their statistical significance.  Since that run, many others followed.  Those runs, and the relative analyses, not only provided answers to Iowa public health officials but also comprised a substantial component of the paper “Exploratory spatial analysis of birth defect rates in an urban population” (“Statistics in Medicine”, Vol. 7, Issue 7-9, 1996).  However, the main lesson learned from this incident is that, in the pursuit of scientific inquiry and knowledge at the edge, one should not hesitate to take risks and should not spare time and effort in order to attain a goal that is scientifically promising and sound.  And that’s one of Prof. Rushton’s main characteristics."

Panos Lolonis, Member of the Scientific Council; KTIMATOLOGIO S. A. (Hellenic Cadastre) (Ph.D. Iowa, 1994).

Gerry Rushton is a remarkable mentor. He leads by example with just a touch of gentle persuasion thrown in for good measure. He is an active researcher himself; extremely well-read and never content to limit his range of interests. And, he is able to impart his enthusiasm for the discipline and the focus of his current research to his graduate students. I was fortunate to be among the first of Gerry’s Ph.D. students at Iowa shortly after he arrived back at his doctoral alma mater.  I caught Gerry during his “central place phase” before he had done a lot of work in the field of medical geography. And I was a student long before he became proficient with GIS and Spatial Decision Support Systems (SDSS) although rudimentary location-allocation modeling played a big part in my own dissertation thanks to Gerry’s gentle persuasion and his own research with revealed preference structures.  I left Iowa before I had defended my dissertation—in retrospect not a good idea. I was an instructor at the University of Tennessee having completed most of the computer analyses of my dissertation data, but having committed very little of the background material and few of the results to paper, Gerry let me know that he was leaving for an extended trip to India and would certainly like to read a first draft of my dissertation on the way over.  I can truthfully say that I wrote my entire 275+ page dissertation in less than a month. I did not want to disappoint Gerry. Now that is gentle persuasion with a purpose!

Thomas L. Bell, Western Kentucky University (Ph.D. Iowa, 1973).

What I remember most about working with Dr. Rushton (Gerry) was an insistence on quality of thought and a continual desire to learn.  My first independent study with him was intimidating because I had not been held to such high standards before.  Those standards rubbed off on me and drive the way I approach my work.  I appreciate greatly those skills he instilled in me.  The other thing I really thought was awesome about Gerry was his willingness to let me work so closely with one of his former students, Jordan Louviere, while Jordan was at Iowa.  That opened up a lot of venues for me in my post-graduate career. Both Gerry and Jordan have influenced me strongly.  However, it was Gerry who really shaped a wayward, undirected, Geography graduate student into one who could graduate (finally), be a practical executioner of research, and a critical thinker. 

What I liked to try and do every once in a while was get Gerry to laugh.  I think he has an infectious laughter about him that I enjoyed, not that I was always successful… 

Tom Eagle, Eagle Analytics of California, Inc. (Ph.D. Iowa, 1982).

I studied as a doctoral student with Gerry beginning in 2004 and could not have had a better mentor.

His effective mentorship began with his status as a leader in the discipline of geography. He is well‐known for his extensive work in spatial decision support systems, disease mapping, and location‐allocation science, and is sought after as a speaker, collaborator, reviewer and consultant. His status as an established and respected scientist compromises neither his teaching nor mentorship. Gerry’s students are intimately acquainted with his research and are deeply involved in not only carrying out but also shaping research projects.

Gerry and I continue to actively collaborate and have maintained our friendship, even as I left the University of Iowa in 2009. Gerry is a deeply thoughtful person, both scientifically and in his engagement with the lives of those who know him.  Gerry takes the time to learn about the personal lives of his colleagues, and the professional lives of his friends. He enjoys good company, shares his thoughts and personal developments openly, and thrives on connecting like‐minded individuals to each other in mutually beneficial ways. He is an exceptional colleague and devoted friend.

Kirsten Beyer, Medical College of Wisconsin (Ph.D. Iowa, 2009).

Professor Rushton was my Ph.D. advisor from 2002-2007. He is a world-class geographer with numerous contributions the areas of Medical Geography, Quantitative Geography and GIS, and I am so grateful to be his student for five years. I respect Professor Rushton as a great mentor, trust him as a good friend, and I will always cherish the many memories working with him during my years in the Geography Department in Iowa.

Qiang Cai, National Minority Quality Forum (Ph.D. Iowa, 2007).

I was Gerry's Ph.D. student from 1969-1973. He introduced me to the possibility of a systematic approach to understanding and modelling human decision-making and choice behavior. My entire career since leaving the Ph.D. program at Iowa has been devoted to this area, and if it wasn't for Gerry Rushton I would not have started an academic research center entirely devoted to this study (The Centre for the Study of Choice, or "CenSoC"), nor would I have had a very interesting and highly successful academic career with over 200 papers, book chapters and books in this field. Thanks Gerry! Best wishes for a long and happy retirement!

Jordan Louviere, Co-Director, The Centre for the Study of Choice (CenSoC) The University of Technology, Sydney (Ph.D. Iowa, 1973).

Gerry has been incredibly influential in making me the geographer I am today.  When I started in the geography Ph.D. program at Iowa, I was somewhat naive and did not have a clear understanding of geographic perspectives and research.  In my first semester, I took a class called Location Theory that was taught by Gerry.  It was the most challenging geography class I ever took.  Fairly often, I did not understand the main points and had to work very hard to grasp them.  In the end, however, I felt like I learned a lot and did well.  At that point, I asked Gerry to be my advisor.  From there, he supervised my Ph.D. research, and he has been very supportive of my career ever since.

Gerry is a brilliant and demanding scholar and scientist.  He had very high expectations and wanted his students to meet and even exceed those expectations.  He pushed me very hard in my Ph.D. program, forcing me to explain clearly what I was doing and to justify its significance.  There were times when it was difficult to face such persistent challenges from my advisor, but in the end it made me a stronger person and a much better geographer.  Another thing I remember about Gerry was his brilliant insights about a topic.  He understands geographic problems from a slightly off-center perspective that can lead to path-breaking innovations.  For example, his spatial cluster detection method, developed in the 1990s proposed a neat and fundamentally different way of identifying disease hotspots that even statisticians had not considered.  As a graduate student, I found it very challenging to figure out what Gerry was thinking, but when I finally understood it, it was incredibly exciting.  There were lots of "aha moments" when I studied with Gerry.

I've also greatly appreciated Gerry's strong support post-Ph.D..  Early on, he read drafts of my papers and gave comments.  Later, he nominated me for committees, reviewed book manuscripts, and helped me make contacts in organizations like the National Institutes of Health and National Science Foundation.  I would not be where I am today without Gerry's academic guidance and unwavering support.

Sara McLafferty, University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana (Ph.D. Iowa, 1979).