Description of the Award

Since 1998, this award has recognized superior scholarship in a doctoral dissertation completed by a student enrolled in an ACSP-member school.

The committee seeks a thesis that is original, well written, employs methods elegantly, offers lessons pertinent to central issues in the field of planning, and provides guidance about how planners or governments should make choices.

The award includes a cash grant in the amount of $500 USD provided by Cornell University plus waived conference registration from ACSP if the student is able to attend. The winner will be invited to present their paper at a special Student Award Paper Session at the ACSP Annual Conference.

Deadline to Submit

The deadline to submit your application is June 1. Scroll to the bottom of this page for the nomination submission form.

Criteria

Nominees must have received the doctoral degree in the two years preceding the upcoming conference.

Nomination Information

• The committee will accept for review no more than one nomination from each doctoral program.
• Initial nominations, to come jointly from the dissertation committee chairperson and the department chair or director of graduate studies, should consist of ONLY the table of contents and the introductory and concluding chapters. The committee may then ask for the full thesis from selected finalists.
• The nomination must include two letters of recommendation, one of which must be from the chair of the nominee’s dissertation committee, and a university document indicating the date of award of the degree.

Biography of Barclay Gibbs Jones

Barclay Gibbs Jones (1925-1997) devoted his life to academia. He held four university degrees -- a B.A. in Fine Arts (before WWII, which included time as a wounded prisoner in Germany) and a B.Arch, both from the University of Pennsylvania, then a Masters in Planning and a PhD in Economics, both from the University of North Carolina. After a few years teaching at Berkeley (and finishing his thesis), in 1961 Barclay came to Cornell to reinvigorate and expand its tiny Ph.D. program. The program grew: through 1998 Cornell had awarded 235 doctorates. Jones himself chaired 66 PhD committees in Planning, and he served on uncounted other committees at the master’s and Ph.D. level in planning and many other fields, from industrial engineering to sociology to architectural history. He studied, taught, and wrote -- always with an interest in the normative questions of planning, and often with path-breaking innovation -- in a fields as diverse as architectural design and history, historic preservation, decision theory, quantitative methods, urban development, regional science, and disaster planning.

An eccentric iconoclast, Barclay Jones's main joy was mentoring Ph.D. candidates -- typically between 11 pm and 4 am, every night of the week. When Barclay was awarded the Distinguished Planning Educator award at ACSP in 1990, about 20 percent of the hundreds in the room stood and cheered, in recognition of the time each of them had spent as a student in Barclay’s classroom or office.

Committee

• Rachel Weber, University of Illinois at Chicago, rachelw@uic.edu
• Gwen Urey, California State Polytechnic University, Pomona
• Kris Wernstedt, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University
• Yang Zhang, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University
• Bing Wang, Harvard University
• Erick Guerra, University of Pennsylvania

Past Winners

• 2017 Carole Turley Voulgaris, University of California, Los Angeles
  
• 2016 Elizabeth Hewitt, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey
  
• 2015 Kelcie Mechelle Ralph, University of California, Los Angeles
• 2014 Javier Ruiz-Tagle, University of Illinois at Chicago/University of Chile
• 2013 Erick Strom Guerra, University of California, Berkeley
• 2012 Rebecca Clay Lewis, University of Maryland
• 2011 No winner
• 2010 Jinhua Zhao, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
• 2009 Gerardo Sandoval, Iowa State University
• 2008 Ralph Buehler, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey
• 2007 No winner
• 2006 Philip Ashton, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey
• 2005 Kurt G. Paulsen, Rutgers The State University of New Jersey
• 2004 Anna Laura Wolf-Powers, Pratt Institute and Annette Miae Kim, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
• 2003 Joe Grengs, University of Michigan
• 2002 Mizuki Kawabata, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
• 2001 Kevin Krizek, University of Washington
• 2000 Karen Chapple, University of California, Berkeley
• 1999 Sumila Gulyani, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
• 1998 Sidney Wong, University of California, Berkeley and Grant Saff, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey

Submit Your Application Below