Gianfranco PirasGianfranco Piras is an Associate Professor of Economics at the Busch School of Business and Economics at The Catholic University of America. Formerly, he was a Research Assistant Professor at the Regional Research Institute at West Virginia Universit. He has also spent time at the Department of City and Regional Planning at Cornell University, the Regional Economic Application Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and at the GeoDa center at Arizona State University. He held a position of Assistant Professor at the Universidad Catolica del Norte in Chile. Dr. Piras is a member of the editorial board of Letters of Spatial and Resource Sciences. Dr. Piras' research interests include spatial econometrics and statistics, urban and regional economics, computational methods and software development. He is one of the developers of the R software for statistical computing and he is currently working on two main libraries, for the estimation of spatial panel data models (SPLM), and for the application of GM methods in spatial econometrics (SPHET). Read More Read Less