Dr. Saied Yousefi, the Assistant Professor in the Architecture Department receives the Visiting International Fellowship award (VIF) from the World Environmental and Water Resources Congress (EWRI, May 22-26, 2016), held in West Palm Beach, Florida, USA.

Reported by Iranian Students' News Agency (ISNA), Dr. Yousefi, as a faculty member of project management and construction group, presented his pioneer research at the congress about "attitude-based negotiation methodology for resolving complex disputes taken place in water and environment industry". Using a real-life case study in Iran, he tries to emphasize the crucial impact of negotiators' attitudes on the negotiation outcomes.

Graduated from the University of Waterloo in Canada, Dr. Yousefi believes that in order to better deal with very complex controversies and disputes over quality and quantity of water and environment, conventional negotiation methodologies may not be effective anymore, and as such, non-conventional negotiation methodologies that incorporate the human factors, can be effectively used for complex conflicts. The results would be more realistic and useful for the parties involved. In his research, Dr. Yousefi proves that negotiation with the negative attitudes will never reach to a mutual agreement. The member of American Project Management Institute (PMI) states that negotiation methodology developments that are based on engineering modeling, should consider and incorporate human factors such as fear, attitudes, emotion, as these parameters incredibly influence the outcomes of negotiation for resolving disputes.

It should be mentioned that Environment and Water Resource Institute (EWRI) is a one of the largest subsidiaries of America Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE). EWRI holds its annual gathering in the US with the participation of hundreds of experts within the US as well as many international scholars in water and environment issues.  

 For more information, please visit the conference website: http://www.ewricongress.org

For the ISNA interview (in Farsi) with Dr. Yousefi, please click here: http://www.isna.ir/news/95040102109/