Susan Podziba
Lecturer in Urban Planning and Design
Susan Podziba, Principal at Podziba Policy Mediation, has served as a public policy mediator for more than 30 years. Most of her projects include working with senior leadership of governments, representative stakeholders, civil society, and the general public. Her clients have included the United States Departments of Commerce, Defense, Education, Labor, Health and Human Services, Housing and Urban Development, Interior, and Transportation, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, U.S. Senate, U.S. Institute for Peace, United Nations, The World Bank, International Monetary Fund, British Council, Netherlands Organization for Applied Scientific Research, Emilia Romagna Regional Authority of Italy, and Negotiation Strategies Institute of Jerusalem. She is listed on the United Nations Mediator Roster and is recipient of a National Partnership for Reinventing Government Award.
Ms. Podziba is author of Civic Fusion: Mediating Polarized Public Disputes and Our City: From Corruption to Participatory Democracy as well as numerous book chapters and journal articles. Her projects have been reported on by the New York Times, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe and major radio and television networks. Two of her cases were highlighted in documentaries shown on public television stations: Public Enemies Private Friends, about secret talks she facilitated among prolife and prochoice leaders after fatal shootings at two women’s health clinics in Brookline, Massachusetts and We the People, about the Chelsea Charter Consensus Process.
Ms. Podziba founded the Sacred Lands Project and serves as an expert for the course, Religion and Conflict Transformation, which is organized by SwissPeace at the University of Basel. She has been faculty for negotiation and mediation courses and the advanced mediation executive course at the Program of Negotiation at Harvard Law School, lecturer at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a Fulbright Senior Specialist in Peace and Conflict Resolution. She currently lectures internationally, most recently in Israel and Bahrain.
Ms. Podziba has a Master of City Planning from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she studied mediation and international conflict resolution, and a Bachelor of Arts in philosophy, with concentrations in social theory and biblical studies from the University of Pennsylvania.
For more information about her projects, see podziba.com/projects