Biography:  Manfred M. Fischer (born in 1947, Nuremberg, Germany) graduated in geography and mathematics from the Friedrich-Alexander University in Erlangen (Germany). He holds a Ph.D. (summa cum laude) on urban modelling from the same university (1975), and a habilitation degree in human geography from the University of Vienna (1982). Since 1988 he is professor in economic geography and GIScience at the Vienna University of Economics and Business. Manfred M. Fischer was co-founder of the prominent interdisciplinary journal Geographical Systems (Gordon & Breach) and is now editor-in-chief of its successor, the Journal of Geographical Systems (Springer), and is a member of the editorial boards of several other peer-reviewed journals. He also co-founded the Springer book series, Advances in Spatial Science, and served for eight years as Chair of the IGU Commission on Mathematical Models. In this role he was responsible for organizing several of the Commission's highly successful international meetings around the world, including symposia in Shanghai and Beijing (1990).

For more than thirty years he has consistently made significant contributions to regional science and GIScience in general, and spatial analysis, GeoComputation and spatial econometrics in particular. He has published widely, both books and articles in more than 30 distinct academic journals. Recently, his monograph on Metropolitan Innovation Systems has been translated into Chinese (Shanghai People's Publishing   House, 2006).

On account of his scholarly achievements, he has been named a fellow of Regional Science Association International, a foreign fellow of the Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences, and a corr. member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences.