William L. Ury co-founded Harvard’s Program on Negotiation and is currently a Senior Fellow of the Harvard Negotiation Project.

He is the author of five books, including Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In, an eight-million-copy bestseller co-written with Roger Fisher and translated into over thirty languages.

Over the last 30 years, Bill has served as a negotiation adviser and mediator in a variety of conflicts.

With former president Jimmy Carter, Bill co- founded the International Negotiation Network, a non-governmental body seeking to end civil wars around the world.

Bill served as a consultant to the Crisis Management Center at the White House in the 1980s to avert a possible nuclear accident between the US and the Soviet Union.

Ury is also co-founder of the e-Parliament, which offers the 25,000 members of congress and parliament around the world an Internet-based forum in which they can learn from one another other about legislative solutions that work and together tackle global problems.

Bill is the recipient of the Whitney North Seymour Award from the American Arbitration Association and the Distinguished Service Medal from the Russian Parliament. His work has been widely featured in the media from The New York Times to the Financial Times and from ABC to the BBC.

Trained as a social anthropologist, Bill holds a B.A. from Yale and a Ph.D. from Harvard.

Bill has carried out his research on negotiation not only in the boardroom and at the bargaining table but also among the Bushmen of the Kalahari and the clan warriors of New Guinea.