Dr. Olsen founded Two Planet Steel & Two Planet Life. He is the inventor of a method to speed up iron and nickel carbonylation by a factor of more than ten. He won a seminal NASA contract for iron- and steel-making on Mars. He was previously the Principal Investigator for renewable energy storage projects for the California Energy Commission, and before that a scientist of homology statistics, the evolution and phylogeny of protein sequences and the evolution of whole proteomes and genomes at UC San Diego. His basic scientific education was in physics at UC Berkeley and Bedford Modern School (England). He studied architecture at Clare College, Cambridge University for eighteen months.