Dr. Bruno Verdini

Verdini's research and teaching focuses on the journey to test our own blind spots, nurture the imagination, and strive to develop the moral compass, cognitive insights, and emotional skills to genuinely enhance management strategies in: Negotiation, Mediation, and Conflict Resolution, Leadership, Collaborative Decision-Making and Political Communication.

Dr. Verdini proposed, created, and received MIT’s first ever Interdisciplinary and Interdepartmental Ph.D. in Negotiation, Communication, Diplomacy, and Leadership. His doctoral work, involving mentorship from outstanding faculty in four different departments at MIT and Harvard University, examined how to address power disparities and enhance transboundary water, environmental, and energy negotiations between developed and emerging economies. His work won Harvard Law School’s Award for the Best Research of the Year in Negotiation, Decision-Making, Mediation, and Dispute Resolution. Selected from an array of studies and publications across diverse fields, including business, economics, education, government, law, neuroscience, psychology, and public policy, the annual award is named in memory of Professor Howard Raiffa, Emeritus at Harvard Business School and the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, founding father of the negotiation and decision science fields as research disciplines. This is the first and only time in the multi-decade-long history of the award that it has been given to someone from MIT, as well as the first and only time it has been awarded to someone born, raised, and educated in Latin America.

A recipient of the MIT D’Arbeloff Fund for Excellence in Education, Dr. Verdini designed from scratch and teaches MIT's top-ranked electives 11.011 The Art and Science of Negotiation & 11.111/17.381 Leadership in Negotiation: Advanced Applications, for which him and his outstanding students have been featured on MIT's Homepage, MIT News, and more recently MIT's Open Learning, amidst the pandemic.

In the spring of 2016, Dr. Verdini created an entirely new 11.011 syllabus from scratch, as he prepared to teach the course for the first time, which had been previously taught with great expertise by distinguished faculty from Harvard Business School and MIT, directors and vice-presidents of some of the most prestigious consulting firms and foundations in the world. With his new pedagogy in place, enrollment numbers increased 1,450%, going from 40 to over 620 STEM students from 20 different departments pre-registering to vie for 72 roster spots per year, breaking all departmental records of the past 5 decades combined. Subsequently, Dr. Verdini was entrusted by MIT with helming the university-wide efforts to create MIT’s Concentration in Negotiation and Leadership, which was launched in Course 11 at the start of the 2018-2019 academic year, serving Schwarzman, Rhodes, Fulbright, DAAD, Mitchell, and Marshall scholars across campus. In tandem with his design and launch in the spring of 2018 of 11.111 Leadership in Negotiation: Advanced Applications, winner of the 2020 Teaching with Digital Technology Award, MIT became one of the first major universities in the U.S. to offer year-long MBA-J.D.-professional-level negotiation training strictly for undergraduates.

As Executive Director of the MIT-Harvard Mexico Negotiation Program, part of the inter-university MIT Harvard Public Disputes Program, Dr. Verdini leads the binational teaching, research, and training initiative. The mission is to further support the skills and strategies available to public, private, and non-governmental stakeholders involved in local, regional, and international water, energy, infrastructure, and environmental disputes. The breakthroughs emerge from and extend beyond Mexico’s natural resource management experiences across North and Central America, by cross-pollinating insights from an array of partnerships involving economies across Latin America, the Caribbean, South East Asia, North Africa, and the Middle East. The responsibility is to strengthen best practices that boost energy transition and planning, strengthen ecosystem restoration, enhance infrastructure development, and improve resilience in the face of climate risks.