Aurélien COLSON is Associate Professor of Political Science and Negotiation at ESSEC Business School, Paris-Singapore, and Director of the Institute for Research and Education on Negotiation in Europe (IRENE). ESSEC IRENE has run operations in 52 countries, with more than 2,500 participants a year, and has research activities with close links with the Program on Negotiation at Harvard.

Since 1998 Aurélien has been teaching negotiation, change management, and leadership at ESSEC for MBA students and for corporation executives. Since 1998 he is also an adjunct professor in negotiation at ENA –France’s national administration school– where he was promoted in 2002 to coordinator of the negotiation seminar.

He has done research, consulting and trainings, worldwide, for companies (Accenture, Actelion Pharma, Alcatel Lucent, Bank of Cyprus, The BCG, Canal+, Caisses d’Epargne, Delphi, Disney, EADS, Essilor, Faurecia, Gemplus, MPI, Philips, Renault-Nissan, Saint-Gobain, Scientific Atlanta, Société Générale, TBWA, Thales, etc.) and public organizations (European Commission, The World Bank, UNDP, United Nations Institute for Training and Research, the Central Bank of Venezuela, etc.). He also contributes to fieldwork and post-conflict facilitation efforts in Burundi, DR Congo, Macedonia-FYROM, and Tajikistan.

He published with Alain Pekar Lempereur the best-selling Méthode de négociation (2004), translated into English as First Things First: A Negotiation Method (2008), and co-edited with him Négociations européennes. D’Henri IV à l’Europe des 27 (2008). He then published Méthode de médiation (2008, with Lempereur & Salzer). His research on negotiation and futures studies appears in peer-reviewed journals such as Journal of International Negotiation, Négociations, Revue française de gestion, Personnel, Contrats publics, Futuribles, Futures, Foresight, and International Relations. Latest book: Méthode de médiation (2008, with Alain P. Lempereur & Jacques Salzer).

From 1998-2002, Aurélien served as Advisor to the French Prime Minister. From 2002-2005, he was Project Leader at the French Government’s strategy agency, where he led a task force on change management and negotiation in the public sector (La conduite du changement dans le secteur public, 2005). He also worked on futures studies.

Aurélien holds a doctorate in political science (Université Paris-Sorbonne-Descartes) and a PhD in International Relations (University of Kent). He got his first degree from Sciences Po Paris. As a Jean-Monnet Fellow from the British Council, he received a Master in International Conflict Analysis (Kent). He then got his MBA at ESSEC. A member of the British International Studies Association and of the Association française de science politique, he is a Fellow of the 21st Century Trust (London). In 2002 he was awarded a Marshall Memorial Fellowship by the German Marshall Fund of the USA. In 2008 the Académie des sciences morales et politiques (Institut de France) awarded a Grand Prix to his research.

Aurélien is married, the father of two sons, and lives in Paris. French is his mother tongue, he is fluent in English. Among his hobbies are playing the piano, cooking and sharing a nice bottle of wine with friends.

Séverine LEBRUN is a Project Manager at the Institute for Research and Education on Negotiation in Europe (IRÉNÉ), at ESSEC Business School, Paris, where she is in charge of the trainings at the EC.

She also teaches negotiation and mediation at ESSEC (ESSEC MS), the Ecole Nationale d’Administration (ENA), the Institut National des Etudes Territoriales (INET), the Ecole Nationale des Ponts et Chaussées (ENPC), Paris V University (Master of Law and Development Policy) and Lille I University (Master of European Affairs). She has contributed to the delivery of trainings in negotiation for major companies (Alcatel-Lucent, Axa, Faurecia, Sanofi-Pasteur, Scientific Atlanta) and is currently working on a research inter-cultural negotiation project.

Before joining ESSEC IRÉNÉ, she worked in 2006 for the Agence France-Presse (AFP), where she was involved in the copyrights negotiation against Google. From 2003 to 2005, she was part of the negotiation of public-private partnerships in the water sector for the Group Veolia Environnement in Paris and in Asia (HK, Mainland China, Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, South Korea). In 2002, she worked at UNESCO in Paris as a Project Officer within the Vocational and Technical Education Department.  In 2001, she worked at UNICEF in London as a Communications Officer on various development issues.
 
She holds MA degrees from Reims Management School (Master of International Management), the Institut d’Etudes Politiques in Paris (Master of Development Management) and the Ecole doctorale of the Institut d’Etudes Politiques in Paris (Master of International economics). She also attended the War Studies course at King’s College London, University College London.

Francesco MARCHI is a researcher at the Institute for Research and Education on Negotiation in Europe (IRÉNÉ), at ESSEC Business School, Paris, where he is in charge of the trainings at the EC and of a research project on decision-making practices in the EU.

He currently teaches negotiation, European Union Politics and Comparative Politics at ENSAM (Master in East-West European Project Management, Cluny), SMU of Dallas (Paris) and IES (Paris). He is a PhD candidate at the Centre d’études européennes of Sciences Po Paris and his research focuses on the constitutional Convention chaired by Valéry Giscard d’Estaing. In this framework he was visiting research fellow at the CEFRES (Prague) and the Istituto Affari Internazionali (Rome) within the CONNEX and CONSENT European networks of excellence.

Before joining ESSEC IRÉNÉ, he was research assistant at Notre Europe for the area of institutional reforms and direct democracy practices in Europe when he participated to the steering Committee of the first pan-European deliberative poll “Tomorrow’s Europe” organized in collaboration with the Center for Deliberative Democracy of Stanford University. During two years he was also research assistant at the Jean Monnet Chair of Sciences Po Paris where he collaborated to the organization of international conferences with top European research networks. Since 2003 he is a member of the steering Committee of the Cluny European Summer University (ENSAM) where he organizes the simulations of the European institutions.

He holds Master in European Studies (with Honors) from the Ecole doctorale of the Institut d’Etudes Politiques in Paris, a Certificate of International Studies from the School of International Studies and Law of Coventry and a Laureate in Political Science and International Studies (Magna cum Laude) from the Faculty of Political Studies of Catania. He also participated to several doctoral training courses at EUI (Florence) and ARENA (Oslo).

Ta-Wei CHAO is currently Visiting Scholar in the Institute for Research and Education on Negotiation in Europe (IRENE), at ESSEC Business School, Paris, and has been a consulting manager in Accenture Taipei office. Over the last several years with Accenture, he worked extensively in the Greater China area, to help his clients become high-performance business by enhancing their negotiation and management capabilities. Mr. Chao has participated in 50+ client's real negotiation sessions to facilitate their negotiation with their suppliers. During those latest projects, he applied his strategic thinking capabilities and negotiation profession to help his clients achieve accumulated 40 million USD annual saving in 26 electronic component commodities.

He is currently studying the ‘Cross-Cultural Negotiation’ issues in IRENE. Based on his research results with ESSEC IRENE over the past years, his latest 2-day/ 4-module training workshop "Negotiate Business Deals in China" has been launched by ESSEC in 2008.

He is also a senior trainer with a rich experience of international training delivery. In Asia, he was the trainer of Accenture Asian Training Centre in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia and delivered training to the consulting professionals in Accenture. As a visiting scholar at ESSEC IRÉNÉ, he has been in charge of several workshops for the European Commission, and for ENA, ENPC, the ESSEC MBA, and the ESSEC MS, namely for the Leading Teams seminar. He has also delivered training and coaching in executive education to professionals in the corporate domain, for example for Alcatel-Lucent and Faurecia.

Besides negotiation consulting, Mr. Chao also accumulated different project experiences in management consulting area which includes supply chain management, customer relationship management, strategic sourcing, outsourcing feasibility study, shared service planning, business process reengineering and IT implementation. The industry exposure includes high-tech, retailing, logistics, transportation, telecommunications and government.

Ta - Wei owns the Master degree in Transportation Engineering and the Bachelor one in Civil Engineering from National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan. Chinese and Taiwanese are his mother tongues. He can also speak English and French.

Brigitte LEROUX has been working as an Assistant at ESSEC IRÉNÉ since 2002. She is in charge of IRÉNÉ's administrative issues, the coordination of the trainings, the organization of seminars and conferences. She organized several international conferences which gathered several hundreds of people: "Aux sources de la négociation européenne" (June 2003); "Talleyrand, Prince of Negotiators" (February 2004); "New trends in Negotiation Teaching" (November 2005); as well as the 10th Anniversary of ESSEC IRÉNÉ around Dr. Shirin Ebadi, Nobel Peace Prize (November 2006).

Before joining ESSEC IRÉNÉ, she worked for five years at the ESSEC Library and for ten years for a public works company.

She holds a baccalauréat in literature and a BTS of trilingual secretary. During her career, she passed with merit the English Business Diploma delivered by the Franco-British Chamber of Commerce. French is her mother tongue, she is fluent in English, German and Spanish.

Audrey LOLIC is working as an apprentice secretary with ESSEC IRÉNÉ to prepare her “BTS Assistante de Gestion”.

She handles the logistics of the trainings, she is in charge of the updating of IRÉNÉ’s web site and deals with some administrative tasks.

Before joining ESSEC IRÉNÉ, she worked, in 2008, for an insurance company, where she was a Manager Assistant.

 Nathalie KLEIN is the Program Associate for the “Negotiators of the World” program at ESSEC IRÉNÉ.Graduated from the Institute of Political Science of Lyon, she also obtained the Contemporary Arabic World Diploma from Lyon University. In this frame, she spent one year in Morocco to conduct researches about illiteracy containment in Morocco, as well as cultural links preservation in bi-cultural marriages. She attended the Conflict analysis course of the Institute of Political Science of Lille.
In charge of program monitoring and new projects prospecting, she participates also to trainings provided by IRÉNÉ, at ESSEC and for several companies. She was the junior trainer in several facilitation workshops organized in the Democratic Republic of the Congo by the ILCCE. She is in charge of relations with the European Peacebuilding Liaison Office (EPLO) in Brussels.
Very interested in the Arabic world and Africa, she contributes to research activities led by IRENE.

Anna PENFRAT is an intern for the “Negotiators of the World” program at ESSEC IRÉNÉ.

Currently a student at the Institute of Political Studies of Lille, she is majoring in International Relations. After spending a year in Canada studying conflict management and resolution, she attended the “Conflict Analysis” course of the Institute of Political Studies of Lille.

Highly interested in negotiation and mediation issues, she participated in a few Model United Nations, including Harvard National Model United Nations in February 2009.

She contributes to the development of new projects for Negotiators of the World and works on the relations with the European Peacebuilding Liaison Office (EPLO) in Brussels. She is also involved in the organization of the European Conference on Mediation.

Emmanuel VIVET is currently a visiting Researcher at IRÉNÉ.

From 2007 to 2009, he was the Asia counsellor at the French Permanent Representation to the EU in Brussels. During the French presidency of the EU, he chaired the coasi group of the Council - EU27 discussions on relations between the EU and Asian countries.

Before this (2002-2007), he had been working for 5 years in the field of international air transport negotiations; initially as the first assistant to the French chief negotiator for bilateral air services agreements at the Ministry of Transport in France (Directorate General for Civil Aviation), where, in that function, he participated in some 50 aeronautical bilateral negotiations between France and 30 non-European countries; then, from 2005, as a National Expert at the European Commission, Directorate for Air Transport, on the issue of international air services agreement (EU-US open skies agreement, EU - Morocco agreement, Siberian overflights issue etc.).

He graduated from ESSEC Business School, Sciences Politiques Paris and ENA master of public administration.