Laith A. Jawad obtained a degree (MSc) in fish taxonomy from the Zoology Department, University of Bristol, UK, in 1980. He continued as fish taxonomist at Basrah University, Iraq, where he worked for more than 20 years before he immigrated to New Zealand in 1997. During this time, he started the biochemical taxonomy of fishes of Iraq and published over 400 scientific papers and book reviews in leading scientific journals. He is the author and co-author of several textbooks in biology published in Arabic. Recently, he contributed five chapters to a book about coastal fishes, Coastal Fishes: Habitat, Behavior and Conservation, published by Nova Publishers, Canada. And authored a book about Dangerous Fishes of the Eastern and Southern Arabian Peninsula published by Springer in 2017. He served as fish biodiversity expert and consultant at the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries in Oman for the period 2008–2012 during which he co-authored two papers describing a new fish species fromthe Omani waters and reported over 80 fish species as a new record to the Omani waters. He authored a guide to the fishes of the southern coasts of Oman published by the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries in Oman in 2018. He also published over 90 papers on fish fauna of Oman, Iraq, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia. In 2013, he broadened his scientific contact and started to collaborate with over 60 scientists from more than 50 countries around the world in researches dealing with different aspects of fish taxonomy and ichthyology.
