Laith Al-Shawaf, Ph.D.
  • Welcome
  • Research
  • Academic
  • Popular Science
  • Media & Podcasts
  • Miscellany
  • Welcome
  • Research
  • Academic
  • Popular Science
  • Media & Podcasts
  • Miscellany
RESEARCH

I'm a researcher and Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Colorado in Colorado Springs. Before moving to the U.S., I taught and conducted research in Germany, Turkey, and Lebanon and was a Visiting Fellow at the College of Life Sciences at the Institute for Advanced Study in Berlin. I am an adviser at Ideas Beyond Borders, an organization dedicated to spreading secularism and civil rights in the Arab world, and Chief Academic Advisor to the Center for Applied Social Cognition Research (CASCR) in Lebanon. I am also affiliated with the Lyda Hill Institute for Human Resilience (NIHR), and am a member of AGYA, the Arab-German Young Academy of Sciences and Humanities. I was recently named a Rising Star by the Association for Psychological Science (APS).

My areas of specialization are evolution, emotion, cognition, and personality & individual differences. Some selected publications are available under “Academic”.
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I conduct cross-cultural studies on these topics with a network of collaborators and friends. Our research has been featured in the BBC, Time Magazine, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, Huffington Post, World Economic Forum, Ars Technica, Phys.org, The Today Show, Men’s Health, Cosmopolitan, and Psychology Today.
 
I sometimes write non-academic essays for a general audience. These can be found under “Popular Science”.

I got my PhD in psychology (with an additional concentration in applied statistical modeling) at The University of Texas at Austin. Before that, I was an undergraduate Merit Scholar at the American University of Beirut in Lebanon, where my concentrations were in psychology, philosophy, and cognitive science. 

I’m interested in many different disciplines and believe in the value of breadth and interdisciplinary work. Please contact me if you're interested in any of these topics, have new proposals, or would like to collaborate. 
 
Happy sciencing!



​"​So far as we class the states or fields of consciousness, write down their several natures, analyze their contents into elements, or trace their habits of succession, we are on the descriptive or analytic level. So far as we ask where they come from or why they are just what they are, we are on the explanatory level."
​- William James   

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