Facilitators
Daniel Shapiro
Daniel Shapiro’s life mission is to help people interact more effectively. As founding director of the Harvard International Negotiation Program, he has advised everyone from leaders of war-torn countries to executives at Fortune 500 companies and family-owned businesses alike, helping countless people solve the very human problems that divide them. Drawing on these experiences and decades of research, he has developed a wealth of practical approaches to amplify influence and leadership — in business, in government, and in life.
Dr. Shapiro is associate professor of psychology at Harvard Medical School/McLean Hospital and affiliate faculty at the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School. Named one of Harvard’s top 15 professors by the Harvard Crimson, he has launched successful negotiations in the Middle East, Europe, and East Asia, and chaired the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on Conflict Resolution. Through nonprofit funding, he developed a high-impact program on collaborative problem-solving that has reached more than one million people across more than 20 countries.
Dr. Shapiro is author of the award-winning bestseller Negotiating the Nonnegotiable, providing groundbreaking methods for overcoming polarizations at work, at home, and abroad. He also co-authored the negotiation classic Beyond Reason: Using Emotions as You Negotiate, and has contributed to The New York Times, The Boston Globe, TIME magazine, and other popular publications. He is the recipient of numerous awards, including the American Psychological Association’s Early Career Award and the Cloke-Millen Peacemaker of the Year Award.
His life’s joy is spending time with his wife and three young boys, who have proven to be his greatest teachers in how to negotiate the nonnegotiable.
Connie Meyer
Connie Meyer is a facilitator, mediator, and coach with nearly 20 years of experience in the field of alternative dispute resolution. After earning an M.A. in intercultural conflict management from Lesley University, Connie joined a spin-off of the Harvard Negotiation Project, working for many years as an instructor and coach for corporate managers and executives.
Her corporate work has spanned multiple industries and focused on skills for effective negotiation, communication, and influence. She logged hundreds of hours as a mediator for the Center for Conflict Resolution (CCR) in Chicago and underwent advanced negotiation and mediation training at Harvard Law School.
Connie also teaches negotiation at the Segal Design Institute's Master of Product Design and Development program. Connie’s day-to-day focus is designing and delivering excellent learning and development programs as Director of Learning at Chicago non-profit Interfaith America (IA), where she helps leaders and organizations navigate religious diversity. In 2022, Connie earned the School of Professional Studies’ Distinguished Teaching Excellence Award.
Guest Speakers
Leonard L. Riskin
Len Riskin is a Visiting Professor at Northwestern Pritzker School of Law, Distinguished Senior Fellow at its Center on Negotiation, Mediation, and Restorative Justice as well as Professor of Law Emeritus at the University of Florida and the University of Missouri-Columbia, where he also served as Director of the Center for the Study of Dispute Resolution. Before his academic career, Len was a trial attorney for the U.S. Department of Justice and general counsel of the non-profit National Alliance of Businessmen (later, National Alliance of Business), both in Washington, D.C. Len studied at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (BS), New York University (JD) and Yale (LLM).
Since 1980, he has been mediating, writing about mediation, and training lawyers, law students, executives, and others in alternative methods of dispute resolution. He has published numerous articles and several books on dispute resolution, including Dispute Resolution and Lawyers (with others) (6th ed., 2019); and Negotiation and Lawyers (with others) (2021). His latest book, Mindfully Managing Conflict: Don't Believe Everything You Think (2023) combines negotiation, mindfulness, and internal family systems (IFS). His academic articles have appeared in many journals, including the California Law Review and the Harvard Negotiation Law Review; and his personal essays in popular publications, such as the Atlantic and the New York Times Magazine. He proposed a widely used system for understanding mediation based on the facilitative-evaluative and narrow-broad dimensions, and has received awards from the American Bar Association, the CPR International Institute for Conflict Prevention and Resolution, International Academy of Mediators, and the Southern California Mediation Association.
Len has practiced mindfulness meditation since 1990, and since 1999, has taught mindfulness to mediators, lawyers, law students, corporate executives, and others across North America and in Europe. He has published many articles on the relationship between mindfulness and conflict resolution. Since 2010, he has integrated Internal Family Systems with conflict resolution and mindfulness in his writing, teaching, and practice.
Alyson Carrel
Alyson Carrel is a clinical professor at Northwestern Pritzker School of Law and Co-Director of the law school’s nationally-ranked Center on Negotiation, Mediation, and Restorative Justice. Until 2019, she led the law school's legal technology & innovation initiatives as its inaugural Assistant Dean of Law & Technology. In these roles, she has received a grant to purchase wearable cameras for negotiation simulation courses, a fellowship to integrate the A2J Author platform in mediation advocacy courses, launched TEaCH LAW, a faculty instructional technology initiative, and was awarded the student-voted Outstanding Professor of a Small Class. Carrel is currently researching the impact of emerging technology in dispute resolution and developing a new client-driven competency model for the 21st-century legal professional called the Delta Model.
Prior to her appointment at Northwestern Law, Carrel was the Training Director at the Center for Conflict Resolution, one of the nation’s largest and longest-running community mediation centers, where she directed and lectured in the 40-hour mediation skills training and mediated court-referred cases.
Before attending law school and prior to working at CCR, Carrel managed the Dependency Mediation Program for the Eighth Judicial Circuit of Florida, which provides mediation services to parties involved in child protection/dependency matters. She also worked with the Juvenile Mediation Clinic at the University of Florida School of Law, where she helped train and manage law school clinic students in small-claims mediation, victim-offender mediation, and conflict resolution skills.
Carrel received her JD from the University of Missouri-Columbia, where she published a case note on drafting an effective ADR contract clause and was the Editor in Chief of the Journal of Dispute Resolution. She received her BA in Women’s Studies from the University of Florida where she wrote a thesis focused on domestic relations mediation.