Dr Jon Olsen is an Associate Professor at the Institute for Social Science, The University of Queensland. He serves as Director of URBANiQ: Urban Intelligence for Healthy & Equitable Places @ The University of Queensland, the AURIN UQ-Node, and leads research focused on place and health inequalities. His work explores how the built and natural environments, along with urban planning policies, influence health outcomes and disparities. Jon is also committed to advancing understanding of the intersections between human health and planetary health.
He is Co-I of the NIHR Global Health Research Unit in Social and Environmental Determinants of Health Inequalities (SEDHI) and the NIHR Public Health Research (PHR) Programme-funded Orienting Policy Towards Inequality Minimising Actions (OPTIMA) project, a systems science approach to 20-minute neighbourhood policy and evaluation.
Jon is Senior Editor of the new journal Urban Transitions, Editorial Board Member of Wellbeing, Space and Society, and an Honorary Senior Research Fellow at the University of Glasgow, UK.
I am a quantitative urban geographer and planner with research and teaching backgrounds in economic geography, transport planning, housing policy, and spatial analysis. Currently, I lead and collaborate on projects that examine broader economic, environmental, and social impacts of the sharing economy. In addition, I am interested in the nexus of housing and transport affordability with climate resilience in the Australian and global context. I welcome interdisciplinary research collaboration and motivated students who seek supervision in quantitative urban and environmental research.
