Columbia University's Advanced Consortium on Cooperation, Conflict and Complexity (AC4) was founded in part by Dr. Peter Coleman. AC4 moves beyond the research boundaries of traditionally siloed disciplines to advance the study of perplexing problems such as climate change, protracted conflict and sustainable peace.

Hisako Kobayashi-Levin is an Associate Professor of Kyushu University in Japan, where she teaches Conflict Management and Mediation in the Faculty of Law and the Graduate School of Law. Before she joined the Kyushu University she had lived in New York City where she received her mediator training and practiced mediation. As a leading expert of the American style mediation toward the Japanese society, she speaks at seminars/conferences and conducts mediator trainings in Japan. As a mediator, Hisako Kobayashi-Levin is interested in how we relate to each other and she is discussing with her students the issues related to "recognition," "power," "the right to resist" as well as "humiliation."

Columbia’s Negotiation and Conflict Resolution graduate degree program is designed to train professionals to be effective negotiators and problem-solvers. The curriculum emphasizes a pragmatic approach to resolving conflicts that arise in human resource management, community and labor organization, education and health administration, law and business. Through examination of theory and practical methodology, the program focuses on constructive communication, ethical understanding, cultural awareness and sensitivity, counseling, and resolving conflicts in ways that are favorable for all parties.

Columbia’s part-time master’s program in Negotiation and Conflict Resolution combines theory and applied training to prepare students to develop practical models for negotiating and resolving disputes among parties with differing objectives and desires. This graduate program was developed in cooperation with Columbia’s Center for International Conflict Resolution in the School of International and Public Affairs and the International Center for Cooperation and Conflict Resolution at Teacher’s College.

Andrea Bartoli, Institute for Conflict Analysis and Resolution, George Mason University

At the Institute for Conflict Analysis and Resolution (ICAR), faculty and students are committed to the development of theory, research, and practice that interrupt cycles of violence. ICAR is an innovative academic resource for people and institutions worldwide. It comprises a community of scholars, graduate and undergraduate students, alumni, practitioners, and organizations in the field of peace making and conflict resolution. ICAR is a Commonwealth Center for Excellence, recognized for its leadership in the field and its world-renowned faculty. 

ICAR is committed to:

• Advancing the understanding of deeply rooted conflicts between individuals, groups, organizations, and communities in the United States and all over the world through research, teaching, practice, and outreach

• Carrying on a systematic and ongoing study of the nature, origins, and types of social conflicts

• Developing the requisite processes and conditions for the productive resolution of conflicts
  

David Johnson, The Cooperative Learning Center, University of Minnesota

The Cooperative Learning Center is a Research and Training Center focusing on how students should interact with each other as they learn and the skills needed to interact effectively. We have reviewed more than 800 studies dating back to the late 1800's and have contributed more than 80 research studies of our own to clarify the issue of student to student interaction and learning. Our training includes instructors from pre-school through college in all subject areas. The training has concentrated on North America, but interest is growing around the world.

The primary efforts of the Center are Research and Training. Over the twenty plus years we have conducted more than 80 research studies and a series of extensive reviews of the existing research on cooperation and learning, more than 800 studies dating back to the late l800's, (Cooperation and Competition: Theory and Research). Training for teachers and administrators has been conducted though out the U.S. and Canada, and also in Germany, Scandinavian Countries, England, Saudi Arabia, New Zealand, Turkey, Panama, Singapore, and Hungary. 

Michele J Gelfand, University of Maryland

Michele Gelfand is professor of Organizational psychology at University of Maryland, College Park.  Her research interests include cross-cultural social/organizational psychology; cultural influences on conflict, negotiation, justice, revenge, and leadership; discrimination and sexual harassment; and theory and method in assessing aspects of culture (individualism-collectivism; cultural tightness-looseness).  She received her PhD from University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in 1996, and has been published in many top journals including Academy of Management Review, Academy of Management Journal, Journal of Applied Psychology, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology and Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes.  She also recently published an Annual Review of Psychology chapter on cross-cultural OB  with Miriam Erez and Zeynep Aycan.

Arie Kruglanski, University of Maryland

Throughout his career as a social psychologist his interests have centered on how people form judgments, beliefs, impressions and attitudes and what consequences this has for their interpersonal relations, their interaction in groups and their feelings about various "out groups". In connection with these interests he has formulated a theory of lay epistemics (Kruglanski, 1989) that specified how thought and motivation interface in the formation of subjective knowledge.

The work on lay epistemics has branched in several directions the major which were (1) research on epistemic motivations, need for cognitive closure in particular (2) a unified conception of the parameters of human judgment that offers an integrative alternative (known as the "unimodel") to previous theorizing in a variety of social judgment domains (having to do with persuasion, stereotyping, attribution, and statistical reasoning among others), (3) a "motivation as cognition" research program that resulted in our recent theory of goal systems.

His interest in motivation has also led to a fruitful collaboration with Tory Higgins on (4) the regulatory mode theory in which they distinguish between two fundamental aspects of self-regulation having to do with "locomotion" (encapsulated in the "just do it" dictum) and "assessment" (representing a concern with "doing the right thing").

 

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Dynamical Systems Psychology Lab at Florida Atlantic University

Robin Vallacher is a member of the Social Psychology and Evolutionary Psychology programs and an affiliated member of the Applied Psychology program. He directs the Dynamical Social Psychology Lab, which investigates the dynamic properties of complex human experience at different levels of social reality, from individual functioning (e.g., self-concept, self-regulation, social judgment) to dyadic and group-level processes (e.g., close relations, societal change). Current research topics include evaluative coherence in social judgment, the dynamics of self-evaluative thought, the role of emotion in self-regulation, the emergence and maintenance of self-concept, behavioral and mental synchronization in social interaction, and the emergence of diverse justice beliefs in society and the potential for catastrophic change in these beliefs. These topics are investigated with laboratory experiments utilizing time-series data and by means of computer simulations (cellular automata, attractor neural networks, coupled dynamical systems). Dr. Vallacher is also exploring the relevance of dynamic principles and methods for issues in evolutionary psychology and is adapting dynamical tools to identify the attractors (equilibrium tendencies) underlying the cognitive and affective dynamics of people diagnosed with various forms of mental illness.

Dr. Andrzej Nowak, Florida Atlantic University

Andrzej Nowak is a permanent half-time member of the Psychology Department, Florida Atlantic University. He is also Director of the Center for Complex Systems at University of Warsaw, Poland, and he holds faculty positions at University of Warsaw and the Professional School of Social Psychology in Warsaw. Prof. Nowak is one of the world's leading experts on the modeling and computer simulation of social processes. Using cellular automata, he has modeled the emergence of public opinion in society and linear versus non-linear societal transitions. At FAU, he conducts both simulation and experimental research in the Dynamical Social Psychology Lab in collaboration with Robin Vallacher. Current research projects include the use of cellular automata to simulate the emergence and maintenance of self-concept and linear and non-linear scenarios of societal change, the use of attractor neural networks to model interpersonal and group dynamics, and the use of coupled dynamical systems to simulate the emergence of personality through social coordination. Dr. Nowak is also developing software for identifying attractors (equilibrium states) in the temporal patterns of thought and emotion on the part of people diagnosed with various forms of mental illness.

Dr. Larry Liebovitch, Florida Atlantic University
Dr. Liebovitch earned a bacherlor's degree in physics at City College of New York, and a doctorate in astonomy from Harvard.  He was a Postdoctoral Fellow at M. Sinai School of Medicine in New York, and then served as assistant professor at the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Columbia University.  He is now the director of the Center for Complex Systems and Brain Sciences at Florida Atlantic University, where he also has appointments in the Departments of Psychology and Biomedical Science and at the Center for Molecular Biology and Biotechnology.

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University of Colorado at Boulder

The University of Colorado Conflict Information Consortium, directed by Guy and Heidi Burgess, was founded in 1988 as a multi-disciplinary center for research and teaching about conflict and its transformation. With its primary focus on difficult and intractable conflicts, the Consortium has pioneered efforts to use rapidly advancing information technologies to provide citizens in all walks of life with the information that they need to deal with conflicts more constructively. The Consortium sees such efforts to enhance and mobilize the skills of the general population as critical to efforts to deal with complex, society-wide conflicts.