Maneeza Dawood, PhD

Maneeza Dawood, PhD is an Islamic Psychology Research Fellow at the Alkaram Institute. She completed her doctoral degree in social psychology at Columbia University. Prior to beginning her doctorate, she worked as a research coordinator in the Division of Behavioral Medicine at the Columbia University Medical Center, conducting exercise interventions to attenuate age-related memory loss. She has broadly studied insider and outsider dynamics and the ways in which individuals feel included or excluded in society, with a particular focus on Muslim adolescents. She explores these dynamics using an intersectional and cultural lens, and through mixed-methods, including qualitative (e.g., interviews, focus groups, text analysis), and quantitative (longitudinal, daily diary, social network analysis) approaches, and field studies. Recently, she was awarded a grant from the Templeton Foundation to contextualize virtue development in the daily experiences of Muslim youth and to develop a scale to quantify character virtues within an Islamic context. Her work as a fellow at the Alkaram Institute is aimed at developing a framework of Islamic social psychology.