Lawrence Susskind
Lawrence Susskind is Ford Professor of Urban and Environmental Planning at MIT and head of MIT’s Science Impact Collaborative. He is also an experienced mediator and negotiation trainer who has worked in more than 30 countries. He is co-founder of the inter-university Program on Negotiation (PON) at Harvard Law School where he has worked for three decades to improve the theory and practice of negotiation and dispute resolution. He is Vice-Chair of Instruction at PON and Director of the MIT-Harvard Public Disputes Program. More than 25 years ago he founded the Consensus Building Institute to help provide mediation services in some of the most difficult resource management disputes around the world. He is with Frans Evers the founder of the Program on the management of sustainability in the Netherlands.
Larry provides facilitation, mediation, and dispute systems design-services along with advanced negotiation and mediation training to both public and private sector clients. His areas of expertise include: the management of transboundary waters, renewable energy facility siting, the management of common pool resources (like the Arctic and the ocean), the use of serious games as public engagement tools, innovation in the use of online tools and techniques for joint fact-finding, the rights of indigenous peoples, entrepreneurial negotiation, socially responsible real estate development, public-private partnerships for urban development, and cybersecurity for critical urban infrastructure.