Who We Are

Daniel Shapiro, Ph.D., Founder and Director of the Harvard International Negotiation Program, serves as associate professor in psychology at Harvard Medical School / McLean Hospital and affiliate faculty at the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School.  He consults regularly for government leaders and Fortune 500 companies, and has advised everyone from hostage negotiators to families in crisis, disputing CEOs to clashing heads of state. 

Dr. Shapiro teaches conflict resolution at Harvard College; instructs psychology interns at Harvard Medical School/McLean Hospital; and leads executive education sessions at the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School, Harvard Kennedy School, and Harvard Medical School/McLean Hospital. He also has served on the faculty at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University, and at the Sloan School of Management at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.  

Shapiro specializes in practice-based research—building theory and testing it in real-world contexts. He has launched successful conflict resolution initiatives in the Middle East, Europe, and East Asia, and for three years chaired the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on Conflict Resolution. Focusing extensively on the emotional and identity-based dimensions of negotiation and conflict resolution, Shapiro led the initiative to create the world’s first Global Curriculum on Conflict Management for senior policymakers as well as a conflict management curriculum that now reaches one million youth across more than 20 countries. 

Dr. Shapiro has published widely in the field of conflict resolution, and is author of Negotiating the Nonnegotiable and coauthor of the classic Beyond Reason: Using Emotions as You Negotiate.  Dr. Shapiro has contributed to The New York Times, The Boston Globe, and other popular publications, and is the recipient of numerous awards, including the American Psychological Association’s Early Career Award and the Cloke-Millen Peacemaker of the Year award.  The World Economic Forum named him a Young Global Leader.  He is recipient of Harvard’s Joseph R. Levenson Memorial Teaching Prize for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching, the oldest of the teaching awards given out by the Undergraduate Council.

Selected publications

• Negotiating the Nonnegotiable: How to Resolve Your Most Emotionally Charged Conflicts. Penguin, 2017.
• With Roger Fisher. Beyond Reason: Using Emotions as You Negotiate. Penguin Books, 2006.
• “Before Your Next Fight, Read This.” O, The Oprah Magazine, October 2006.
• “Negotiating the Nonnegotiable: 4 Keys to Resolving Conflict with Your Kid.” Brightly.
• “Of Dating and Diplomacy.” New York Times, May 10, 2016.
• “Why We Are Addicted to Divisive Politics.” TIME, April 18, 2016.

Howard W. Buffett serves as Chair of the Advisory Council for the Harvard International Negotiation Program. He is an adjunct Associate Professor and Research Scholar at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs. He was previously the executive director of the Howard G. Buffett Foundation and coauthored the New York Times best-seller 40 Chances: Finding Hope in a Hungry World (2013). Prior to that, Buffett oversaw economic stabilization programs in Afghanistan and Iraq for the U.S. Department of Defense. He also served as a policy advisor for the White House Domestic Policy Council, where he coauthored the president’s cross-sector partnership strategy.

Lior specializes in designing and leading human-centered processes in seemingly intractable conflicts. Co-founder of a leadership initiative under the academic sponsorship of the Harvard Negotiation Project, he works with key figures across the Middle East and on a global scale. His research focuses at the intersection of human behavior, strategy, and diplomacy, and he brings innovative approaches to problems, opening space for possibilities and curating networks that catalyze action. He holds a degree in Government, Diplomacy and Strategy from the Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya, and completed the Executive Program on Negotiation & Leadership at the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School.

Joshua Greene is a member of the INP Faculty Advisory Committee.  He is an experimental psychologist, neuroscientist, and philosopher.  He studies moral judgment and decision-making, primarily using behavioral experiments and functional neuroimaging (fMRI).  Other interests include religion, cooperation, and the capacity for complex thought.  He is the author of Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them.

Dr. Kimberlyn Leary is Associate Professor at the T.H. Chan School of Public Health at Harvard University, and has been a Senior Advisor in the White House on matters of science education, development, and mental health.  She served as Chief Psychologist at the Cambridge Health Alliance, and has a wealth of experience in policy, research, and practice in psychology, negotiation, and conflict. 

Dr. Jennifer Lerner is the Thornton F. Bradshaw Professor of Public Policy and Management at the Harvard Kennedy School and Co-Founder of the Harvard Decision Science Laboratory. She is the first psychologist in the history of the Harvard Kennedy School to receive tenure.  Professor Lerner also holds appointments in Harvard’s Department of Psychology and Institute for Quantitative Social Sciences.  In addition to her roles at Harvard, Professor Lerner currently serves as Special Advisor to the U.S. Chief of Naval Operations and as the Navy’s first Chief Decision Scientist.

Dr. Nisenbaum has consulted to the Harvard International Negotiation Program since its inception, specializing in family conflict resolution as a global issue. He is a Psychologist, a Mediator and an Attorney who has an appointment to the Medical Staff in the Psychiatry Department at Massachusetts General Hospital/Harvard Medical School and is also an Assistant Clinical Professor at Tufts Medical School.  He has law degree from Harvard Law School where he was an Editor of the Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review.  He has a Ph.D. in Psychology from Clark University, and an B.A. from Northwestern University.

He is on the Board of Directors of the Massachusetts Council of Family Mediators and is Past President of the Massachusetts Chapter of the Association of Family and Conciliation Courts. He is Founder and President of Family Healthy Choices, Inc., a nonprofit agency teaching and assisting divorcing and unmarried parents living apart in raising children and resolving conflict. 

Representative publications are “Negotiation and the Shadow of the Law” in J. DeRivera (Ed.), Handbook on Building Cultures of Peace (2009), “Ethical and Legal Issues in Transitioning the Life Span” (with M.C. Weiss and D. Shapiro) in T. Miller (Ed.) Stressful Life Events: Transitions in the Life Span (2010), and “Ethicolegal Issues in Veterans Healthcare,” (with D. Norman and S. O’Keefe) in T. Miller (Ed.), Praeger Handbook of Veterans Health (2012).

Dr. Bruce Shackleton has served as a Senior Associate to INP since 2003.  He is on the faculty of Harvard Medical School as a Lecturer and is a Clinical Associate at McLean Hospital. He is a consulting psychologist; executive coach, mediator and psychotherapist who has taught mediation and negotiation skills in a variety of business and organizational settings.

In his consulting practice, Dr. Shackleton has worked with executive teams, professional partnerships, family businesses, individuals and families.   He assists his clients in the areas of leadership development, organizational change and identity clarification, as well as negotiation and conflict resolution locally and internationally.  He is currently leading a research project at INP to explore how we can expand our worldviews and sense of identity in the face of emotionally charged conflicts using perspectives achieved by astronauts; Overview Effect.

Dr. Shackleton previously served as a Clinical Associate on the Psychology Staff (Department of Psychiatry) of the Massachusetts General Hospital, where he specialized in occupational health psychology; and consulted on occupational and environmental stress management, and career development.