Kimberlyn Leary is a fellow with New America’s Future Security Program. She is an associate professor of psychology at the Harvard Medical School and also a faculty affiliate at the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School. From January 2015 through June 2016, she served an advisor to the White House Council on Women as a Robert Wood Johnson Health Policy Fellow, followed by a continuation of her fellowship at the White House Office of Management and Budget, in the public health branch.
Leary began her career as a clinical practitioner focused on improving access to diverse communities. Her early work on “negotiated transactions” in psychotherapy expanded to broader research on negotiation and conflict management. Leary’s global work on conflict negotiations includes studying “critical moments” in mediations to end armed conflict in Southeast Asia and researching social enterprise ventures in the Middle East. She teaches courses on leadership and conflict transformation to undergraduates at Harvard College, on advanced negotiation and mediation to senior executives at Harvard Law School, and on physician–community engagement and the doctor-patient relationship at Harvard Medical School.