James Fishkin holds the Janet M. Peck Chair in International Communication at Stanford University where he is Professor of Communication, Professor of Political Science (by courtesy), Senior Fellow of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford and Director of the Deliberative Democracy Lab (housed within the Center for Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law at Stanford). He holds a PhD in Political Science from Yale and a PhD in Philosophy from Cambridge University. He is the author of Democracy When the People Are Thinking (Oxford 2018), When the People Speak (Oxford 2009) and other books. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a Guggenheim Fellow, a Fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioural Sciences at Stanford, and Visiting Fellow Commoner at Trinity College, Cambridge.

James Fishkin first proposed Deliberative Polling® in 1988. Since then, he has applied the idea with collaborators around the world in 50 countries and 120 cases. In the US, two notable recent projects were America in One Room and America in One Room: Climate and Energy.