Todd R. Olson was born in Long Beach, California in 1946. He received his B.A. degree in vertebrate paleontology from the University of California at Berkeley and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa in 1970. After completing a M.A. degree on comparative primate anatomy, he moved from Berkeley to London, England to become a student at St. Thomas’s Hospital Medical School from which he earned his Ph.D. in Human Anatomy and Morphology.

Prior to coming to AECOM in 1989, Dr. Olson taught anatomy at University College London for four years prior to moving from London to New York City in 1979. He taught anatomy in the School of Biomedical Education of the City University of New York Medical School where he was promoted to the rank of Associate Professor with Tenure in 1986. He came to AECOM in 1989 and was promoted to the rank of Professor of Anatomy and Structural Biology in 1997.

Dr. Olson was elected by AECOM’s faculty to the Davidoff Society in 1991 and is one of only a handful of AECOM faculty to have received both the student’s Sam Rosen Outstanding Preclinical Teacher of the Year Award (1994) and the faculty’s Harry Eagle Award for Outstanding Basic Science Teacher (1999).

In addition to being a frequent target for “Skit Night” jokes, Dr. Olson is actively involved in national and international professional organizations that promote research and teaching in clinical anatomy. He is a Scientific Fellow of the Zoological Society of London, the Listserve Administrator for the American Association of Clinical Anatomists, the present Chairman of the statewide Anatomical Committee of the Associated Medical Schools of New York, the past Treasurer of the International Association of Medical Science Educators, and the current Treasurer and Executive Committee member of the American Association of Clinical Anatomists.

In April of 2000, Dr. Olson was the co-organizer and Keynote Speaker at a workshop on the Future of Anatomy in Medical Education with Dr. E. James Potchen, the host and Chairman of the Department of Radiology at the College of Human Medicine of Michigan State University.

Dr. Olson’s textbook the A.D.A.M. Student Atlas of Anatomy, published in 1996 by Lippincott, Williams & Wilkins, has been translated into 5 foreign language editions: German, French, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese. He is coauthor of the anatomy of the second edition of Dr. Ger’s textbook: Essentials of Clinical Anatomy.

He is also the co-author of the A.D.A.M. Practice Practical - Medical Edition , an interactive multimedia Cd-Rom product, with Dr. Albert Pawlina at the Mayo Medical School. An Undergraduate Edition of this computer based learning product was produced in 1999 with Dr. Rose L.Vines at California State University at Sacramento.