Laith Al-Shawaf, Ph.D.

Laith Al-Shawaf is a Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Colorado Colorado Springs. Before moving to the United States, he taught and conducted research at universities in Turkey and Lebanon, and was honored as an International Visiting Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Berlin (Wiko), Germany. Dr. Al-Shawaf is an alumnus of the Arab-German Young Academy of Sciences & Humanities (AGYA), an Academic Advisor at Ideas Beyond Borders (IBB), and Chief Academic Advisor to the Center for Applied Social Cognition Research (CASCR) in Lebanon. 

In 2019, the Association for Psychological Science (APS) named him a Rising Star. Since then, he has won the UCCS Faculty Award for Excellence in Research (2022), the UCCS Students’ Choice Award for Educator of the Year (2022), the UCCS  Letters, Arts, & Sciences Outstanding Teaching Award (2023), the UCCS  Letters, Arts, & Sciences Outstanding Research Award (2024), the Human Behavior & Evolution Society (HBES) Early Career Award for Distinguished Scientific Contributions (2024), the Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse’s (IAST) International Visiting Fellowship (2024), and the HBES Fellow Award (2025). He’s thrilled to be a member of the team at the Lyda Hill Institute for Human Resilience. You can find him on Twitter/X at @LaithAlShawaf.

Emotions, emotion regulation, trauma & resilience, the psychology of hunger, cognitive bias, personality and individual differences, evolutionary approaches to psychopathology.