Robert B. Olshansky, Ph.D., FAICP, is Professor Emeritus of Urban and Regional Planning, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he taught for 28 years. His teaching and research have covered land use and environmental planning, with an emphasis on planning for natural hazards. He has published extensively on post-disaster recovery planning, community relocation following disasters, planning and policy for earthquake risks, hillside planning and landslide policy, and environmental impact assessment.

Professor Olshansky has studied recovery planning and management after numerous major disasters around the world, including ones in the U.S., Japan, China, Taiwan, India, Indonesia, New Zealand, and Haiti. His research has been funded by the National Science Foundation and Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, and in 2004-05 and 2012-13 he was a Visiting Professor at the Disaster Prevention Research Institute at Kyoto University. Along with Laurie Johnson he co-authored Opportunity in Chaos: Rebuilding after the 1994 Northridge and 1995 Kobe Earthquakes (available online), Clear as Mud: Planning for the Rebuilding of New Orleans (APA Press, 2010), and After Great Disasters: An In-depth Analysis of How Six Countries Managed Community Recovery (available online, Lincoln Institute, 2017). In 2014 he co-edited a special issue of the Journal of the American Planning Association on Planning for Disaster Recovery.