Lawrence E. Susskind (born January 12, 1947) is a teacher, trainer, mediator, and urban planner. He is one of the founders of the field of public dispute mediation and is a practicing international mediator through the Consensus Building institute. He has taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology since 1971. Susskind has mediated fifty complex disputes in the United States and in other parts of the world, and is an authority on complex, multi-party negotiations. Since the early 1970s, he has helped to train thousands of negotiators and mediators in the public and private sectors and to promote the use of mediation to resolve facility siting, regulatory, community development, and environmental protection disputes. Susskind's ideas about the techniques and strategies of consensus building have helped to define best practice. In 1993, Susskind founded the Consensus Building Institute (CBI), a Cambridge-based not-for-profit that is now a leading mediation service provider. Through CBI, he has advised the Supreme Courts of Israel, Ireland, and the Philippines; helped to facilitate a variety of international treaty-making efforts; developed the techniques of conflict assessment and joint fact-finding; evaluated collaborative adaptive management efforts; and created new strategies for building organizational negotiating capabilities. In addition to his appointment at MIT, he has been part of the inter-university Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School since 1982. Source: Wikipedia (en)