Dr. May Al-Dabbagh is the Director of the Gender and Public Policy Program, Research Fellow, and DSG Faculty Chair of the Women and Leadership Development program at the Dubai School of Government. She is also a Research Fellow at the Women and Public Policy Program at Harvard University. Her research interests include cross-cultural and social/organizational psychology; theory and method in assessing the relationship between the self and context; cultural and gender differences in leadership, negotiation, and job-related outcomes. 

She earned a Ph.D. in Psychology from the University of Oxford for her doctoral thesis entitled “Working Women in Saudi Arabia: A Study of Stress and Well-Being.”  Dr. Al-Dabbagh spent one year as a post-doctoral research fellow at the University of Oxford. She earned her B.A. degree from Harvard University, where she graduated in 1999 magna cum laude in Psychology.

Al-Dabbagh is a member of the International Association of Cross-Cultural Psychology, the International Association for Conflict Management, the Middle East Studies Association of North America, and the Academy of Management. She has publications in Arabic and English and her work has been featured in over 40 local, regional, and international media outlets. In 2010, she was appointed to the board of the Banawi Industrial Group in Saudi Arabia and the board of the Harvard Alumni Association (HAA) as the Director for the Middle East and Africa region.