John Ottensmann serves as director of urban policy and planning for the Center for Urban Policy and the Environment. He is a professor in the Indiana University School of Public and Environmental Affairs at Indianapolis, where he previously served as director of graduate programs in planning and public affairs and where he has been a faculty member since 1978.

Professor Ottensmann teaches courses in urban planning, urban policy, geographic information systems, and management information systems.

He received a B.A. from the University of Wisconsin at Madison and a Ph.D. in city and regional planning from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1974.

Professor Ottensmann has also served as a consultant to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency for the evaluation of research grants and fellowship applications. He has served as a consultant to a number of planning and engineering consulting firms in Indianapolis, providing advice on forecasting and evaluation methods and performing reviews of comprehensive plans. He has also worked on planning and evaluation for several public libraries, the Health and Hospital Corporation, and the Catholic Diocese of Cleveland.

His research focuses on urban spatial structure and the spatial dimensions of public policy, the use of analytical methods in planning, and the application of geographic information systems. Recent research has examined the use of performance zoning as a tool for the implementation of land use plans, neighborhood racial transition, the delivery of services by urban public library systems, and the development and application of spatial interaction models. He is currently working on further development of the Land Use in Central Indiana Model (LUCI) to predict future patterns of urban development in the region and on a project examining the measurement and consequences of urban sprawl.

He is the author of three books and many articles in a range of scholarly journals, including Planning and Markets, Environment and Planning A, Library Quarterly, Urban Affairs Review, Journal of the American Society for Information Science, Journal of Urban Affairs, Social Science Quarterly, Interfaces, Urban Studies, and the Journal of the American Planning Association.