Our Team
Describe your team here.
Sophia Vázquez is a PhD student in Sociology and Education at Teachers College, Columbia University. A former elementary educator and Cuban-American, she holds a MEd degree in Sociology of Education and an MA in Teaching. Her research interests center on educator identity, race, and culture; specifically, the affective and generational transmission of memory. Sophia has contributed to several research projects focused on antiracist teacher education and ethnic studies. She is currently a project manager with AC4: Advanced Consortium on Cooperation, Conflict, & Complexity. She is also on a team developing a Latinidad curriculum for NYC public schools, working closely with youth cohorts through Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) and community stakeholders. Her dissertation plans to honor lived experience and diasporic educational storytelling through multimodal methods.
Dr. Peter T. Coleman is Professor of Psychology and Education at Columbia University where he holds a joint-appointment at Teachers College and The Earth Institute. Dr. Coleman directs the Morton Deutsch International Center for Cooperation and Conflict Resolution (MD-ICCCR), is founding director of the Institute for Psychological Science and Practice (IPSP), and is executive director of Columbia University’s Advanced Consortium on Cooperation, Conflict, and Complexity (AC4).
Dr. Coleman is a renowned expert on constructive conflict resolution and sustainable peace. His current research focuses on conflict intelligence and systemic wisdom as meta-competencies for navigating conflict constructively across all levels (from families to companies to communities to nations), and includes projects on adaptive negotiation and mediation dynamics, cross-cultural adaptivity, optimality dynamics in conflict, justice and polarization, multicultural conflict, intractable conflict, and sustainable peace.
In 2003, Dr. Coleman became the first recipient of the Early Career Award from the American Psychological Association (APA), Division 48: Society for the Study of Peace, Conflict, and Violence, and in 2015 was awarded the Morton Deutsch Conflict Resolution Award by APA and a Marie Curie Fellowship from The European Union. In 2018, Dr. Coleman was awarded the Peace Award from Meaningful World, in celebration of their 30th anniversary and the UN’s International Day of Peace. Dr. Coleman edits the award-winning Handbook of Conflict Resolution: Theory and Practice (2000, 2006, 2014) and his other books include The Five Percent: Finding Solutions to Seemingly Impossible Conflicts (2011); Conflict, Justice, and Interdependence: The Legacy of Morton Deutsch (2011), Psychological Components of Sustainable Peace (2012), and Attracted to Conflict: Dynamic Foundations of Destructive Social Relations (2013). His last book, Making Conflict Work: Navigating Disagreement Up and Down Your Organization (2014), won the 2016 Outstanding Book Award from The International Association of Conflict Management. He is currently work on a book with Columbia University Press that will be released in 2020 on breaking through the intractable polarization plaguing the U.S. and other liberal democracies across the globe, titled, The Way Out: How to Overcome Toxic Polarization in Politics and in Life.
Dr. Coleman has also authored well over 100 articles and chapters, is a member of the United Nations Mediation Support Unit’s Academic Advisory Council, is a founding board member of the Gbowee Peace Foundation USA, and is a New York State certified mediator and experienced consultant. In 2017, he received the International Association of Conflict Management 2017 Best Conference Theoretical Paper Award for his article Conflict Intelligence and Systemic Wisdom: Meta-competencies for Engaging Difference in a Complex, Dynamic World, and in 2018 The Emerald Literati Award for the paper Adaptive mediation: An evidence-based contingency approach to mediating conflict. Dr. Coleman also founded and edits the MD-ICCCR Science-Practice Blog, the WKCR (89.9 FM) monthly radio program Peace and Conflict at Columbia: Conversations at the Leading Edge, and is a frequent blogger on Huffington Post and Psychology Today. Dr. Coleman’s work has also been featured in media outlets such as The New York Times, The Guardian, The Chicago Tribute, Nature, Harvard Business Review, Forbes, Wired, This American Life, Time Magazine, Fox Business, CBS, Fast Company, Chicago Public Radio, and various international outlets.
Dr. Larry S. Liebovitch is Professor of Physics and Psychology at Queens College of the City University of New York, and serves as Adjunct Senior Research Scientist for AC4. Dr. Liebovitch earned a bachelor’s degree in physics from the City College of New York and a doctorate in astronomy from Harvard University. He was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Mt. Sinai School of Medicine in New York and an Assistant Professor at the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Columbia University. At Florida Atlantic University he served as the interim director of the Center for Complex Systems and Brain Sciences and as the Associate Dean for Graduate Programs and Studies in the Charles E. Schmidt College of Science. He has used nonlinear methods to analyze and understand molecular, cellular, psychological, and social systems. He is the author or coauthor of four books including: Fractals and Chaos: Simplified for the Life Sciences by Larry S. Liebovitch (Oxford University Press, 1998) and Fractal Analysis in the Social Sciences, Quantitative Applications in the Social Sciences, Volume 165, by Clifford T. Brown and Larry S. Liebovitch (SAGE Publications, 2010).
Joshua Fisher joined AC4 as Director in 2014. He leads strategic operations and serves as Principal Investigator for AC4's Environment, Peace, and Sustainability Program. Dr. Fisher employs natural and social science methodologies to understand the nexus of environmental sustainability, natural resource governance, and social stability. He has worked extensively in Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa, Asia Pacific, and the western United States. Dr. Fisher completed his postdoctoral work at The Earth Institute where he focused on biodiversity conservation and sustainable development. Prior to joining AC4, Dr. Fisher worked in the private sector as a Senior Scientist on US Government contracts. He likewise worked with several conservation organizations in the non-profit sector, and formerly served as a land-use planner for the US Bureau of Land Management. He holds advanced degrees in Conflict Analysis and Resolution from George Mason University and in Political Science from Utah State University.
Joan's work is situated in the threshold where sociopolitical processes led by youth community leaders meet with the production of spaces of peace in areas where violent conflicts are rampant. He focuses on understanding the ways youth leaders make sense of violent conflicts, and on how they construct practices and technologies to respond peacefully to the dynamics of such conflicts. He is also interested on how the concrete practices and technologies designed by community youth leaders can inform and further develop academic approaches to peacebuilding, conflict resolution, and leadership; and on how the work of youth leaders can benefit from applying some of the practices and theories that are produced in academia. In short, his work lays where theory and praxis melt. Part of his work at AC4 looks to develop qualitative and quantitative methods to monitor and evaluate the impact of the work led by the youth community leaders with whom we work. In addition to his work at AC4, he is also an adjunct professor of cultural anthropology at City College and Lehman College, CUNY.
Dr. Fry is Professor of Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, Docent of Cross-Cultural Developmental Psychology at Åbo Akademi University in Vasa, Finland, and Adjunct Senior Research Scholar at the Advanced Consortium on Cooperation, Conflict, and Complexity at Columbia University. Fry earned his doctorate in anthropology from Indiana University in 1986. His fieldwork-based dissertation explored the socialization of aggression, childrearing practices, and conflict control mechanisms in two neighboring Zapotec communities in Oaxaca, Mexico. Fry has written extensively on aggression, conflict resolution, war, and peace while holding academic positions in the United States and Finland. Fry’s articles have been published in high-ranking disciplinary and interdisciplinary Journals such as Science, Nature: Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, American Anthropologist, American Psychologist, Child Development, Common Knowledge, The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Aggressive Behavior, Sex Roles, Current Opinion in Psychology, Peace and Conflict: Journal of Peace Psychology, and others.
The thesis of Nurturing Our Humanity, one of Fry’s books co-authored with Riane Eisler (2019, Oxford University Press) is that the path to human survival and well-being in the 21st century hinges on our human capacities to cooperate and promote social equality, including gender equality. About ten years back, Fry edited War, Peace, and Human Nature (2013, Oxford University Press) that includes chapters from biologists, psychologists, archaeologists, primatologists, specialists on hunter-gatherers, and other disciplines, that thoroughly explore and evaluate the human capacities for violence and peace. Fry’s Beyond War (2007, Oxford University Press) and The Human Potential for Peace (2006, Oxford University Press) are widely read and much cited works in anthropology and beyond. Fry also was a co-editor of Keeping the Peace: Conflict Resolution and Peaceful Societies Around the World (2004, Routledge) and Cultural Variation in Conflict Resolution: Alternatives to Violence (1997, Erlbaum). He is currently working on an Advanced Introduction to Conflict Resolution (Edward Elgar Publisher) and an edited book with Geneviève Souillac entitled the De Gruyter Handbook of Conflict Resolution and Peace: Living Sustainably on a Shared Planet (De Gruyter).
Dr. Fry has been a member AC4’s Sustaining Peace Project since its launch in 2014. One of his ongoing research interests is on peace systems, clusters of neighboring societies that do not engage in war with one another. An open access article published in one of the Nature journals, “Societies within peace systems avoid war and build positive intergroup relationships,” explores some of the peace-promoting features of peace systems. Additional publications on peace systems will be available soon.
Dr. Fisher-Yoshida is Co-Executive Director of the Advanced Consortium on Cooperation, Conflict and Complexity (AC4) and Director of the Youth, Peace and Society (YPS) program, both housed in the Earth Institute at Columbia University. In her role at YPS she has been working to develop systemic approaches to building more effective communities through youth leadership in Medellín, Colombia, using a Social Lab approach.
She is also a professor of Professional Practice at the School of Professional Studies at Columbia. Beth Fisher-Yoshida teaches classes in negotiation, conflict resolution, and conflict analysis. Her approach to learning is based on her core belief that when we improve communication by developing more self-awareness, we will have better relationships and improved negotiation practices.
Dr. Fisher-Yoshida partners with clients to develop customized interventions aimed at improving organizational performance. She is able to blend the best of both worlds: the knowledge from academia with effective practices to apply successfully to real life situations. Her firm, Fisher Yoshida International, focuses on leading organizations through change by improving communication and creating shared goals and practices to align with the organization’s mission and vision. She works globally with clients and speaks conversational Japanese having lived and worked in Japan for 13 years.
Dr. Fisher-Yoshida is the author of numerous articles, chapters, edited books, and authored a book on transnational leadership. She has a new book to be released soon on women and negotiation. Her main areas of focus are Coordinated Management of Meaning (CMM), negotiation, intercultural communication, conflict resolution and transformative learning.
Dr. Fisher-Yoshida is also a Certified Clinical Sociologist (CCS).
Dr. Andrea Bartoli is the President of the Sant’Egidio Foundation for Peace and Dialogue - SFPD . He works primarily on peacemaking, genocide prevention and nuclear disarmament. In addition to his role at the Advanced Consortium on Cooperation, Conflict and Complexity AC4 at Columbia University, he is a member of the Steering Group of the Global Action Against Mass Atrocity Crimes - GAAMAC, the Executive Advisor of the Soka Institute for Global Solutions - SIGS at the Soka University of America - SUA.
Dr. Bartoli has been a member of the Community of Sant’Egidio since 1970 (here.) He has been its Representative to the UN and the USG since 1992. He was the Convener of the Genocide Prevention Advisory Network - GPANet; the Dean of the School of Conflict Analysis and Resolution at George Mason University (now the Carter School) and of the School of Diplomacy at Seton Hall University. He was also the Founding Director of the Center for International Conflict Resolution (CICR) at the School of International and Public Affairs, Columbia University.
Adjunct Senior Research Scholar
Aldo Civico is an Adjunct Associate Research Scholar for the Youth, Peace, and Security Program at AC4.