John Gastil (Ph.D., University of Wisconsin-Madison) is Professor and Head, Department of Communication Arts and Sciences at Penn State University. He published DEMOCRACY IN SMALL GROUPS in 1993 and has since continued to explore democracy and deliberation at many levels of analysis in BY POPULAR DEMAND (2000), THE DELIBERATIVE DEMOCRACY HANDBOOK (co-edited with Peter Levine in 2005), and POLITICAL COMMUNICATION AND DELIBERATION (2008). He also returned to the study of group behavior in THE GROUP IN SOCIETY (2010). He is also one of the co-authors of THE JURY AND DEMOCRACY (2010). The National Science Foundation has supported numerous large-scale research programs for which he has served as a principal investigator. He has also worked on campaigns for federal, state, and local office in California and New Mexico.