Richard Gilbert is an urban issues consultant who focuses on transportation, waste management, energy systems, and urban governance, with clients in North America, Europe, and Asia. He serves as transport consultant to the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and to Civic Exchange, a Hong Kong-based think tank, as part-time research director of the Toronto-based Centre for Sustainable Transportation (CST), and as adjunct professor in the Economics Department (Centre d’études en réglement économique et financière) of the University of Sherbrooke.

Richard Gilbert has a 1966 PhD in experimental psychology and gained Ontario registration as a clinical psychologist in 1974. In an earlier career, he was a psychology professor and researcher, teaching at universities in Ireland, Scotland, the U.S., Mexico, and Canada, and associated with the then Addiction Research Foundation of Ontario (now part of the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health) for 23 years. Other university experience includes teaching graduate courses in land-use planning and related topics in York University’s Faculty of Environmental Studies in the 1990s. From 1976-1991 he was a near-full-time elected politician, serving as a member of the councils of what were then the City of Toronto and Metropolitan Toronto, and as president of the Federation of Canadian Municipalities in 1986-87. On retiring from politics, he became the first president and CEO of the Canadian Urban Institute, from 1991-93, and has been working mostly as an independent consultant since then.