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Professor Susskind is one of the country's most experienced public and environmental dispute mediators and a leading figure in the dispute resolution field. He has mediated more than fifty complex disputes related to the siting of controversial facilities, the setting of public health and safety standards, the formulation and implementation of development plans and projects, and conflicts among racial and ethnic groups -- serving on occasion as a special court-appointed master.
Professor Susskind is founder and for thirteen years President of the Consensus Building Institute (CBI), a not-for-profit organization that provides mediation and dispute system design services to public and private clients worldwide. CBI has facilitated the worldwide Policy Dialogue on Trade and the Environment that brings senior WTO officials together with leaders of environmental organizations around the world. CBI staff have also mediated hospital relocation plans and formulation of state health policy reforms, evaluated mediation and dispute resolution efforts for a variety of federal and state agencies, organized training programs for union leaders and their management counterparts, and initiated the Program for Young Negotiators and the Workable Peace Program to teach public school teachers how to teach conflict management and interethnic dispute handling skills to their middle school and high school students. Since 1993, CBI has worked in more than 15 countries and 30 states and provinces.
Professor Susskind joined the faculty of the MIT Department of Urban Studies and Planning in 1971. He served first as Associate Head and then as Head of that Department from 1974 through 1982. He was appointed full professor in 1986 and Ford Professor of Urban & Environmental Planning in 1995. As head of the Environmental Policy Group in the School of Architecture and Planning at MIT, he currently teaches four courses (Negotiation and Dispute Resolution in the Public Sector (11.255), International Environmental Negotiation (11.364) taught jointly with the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, Multi-party Negotiation (11.257) taught jointly with Harvard Law School, and Graduate Introduction to Environmental Policy and Planning(11.601)), oversees a research budget of approximately $250,000 annually, and supervises more than a dozen masters and doctoral dissertations a year.
Lawrence Susskind was born in New York City in 1947. He graduated from Columbia University in 1968 with a B.A. in English Literature and Sociology. He received his Masters of City Planning from MIT in 1970 and his Ph.D. in Urban Planning from MIT in 1973.
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