Dr. Zak Witkower received his PhD in Social and Personality Psychology with a minor in Quantitative Methods from the University of British Columbia, before completing postdoctoral training at the University of Toronto and serving as an Assistant Professor at the University of Amsterdam (UvA). Beginning in Fall 2026, he will join the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Texas A&M University.

Zak’s research investigates how subtle movements of the face and body communicate emotion, social rank, and personality, shaping how people perceive and interact with each other. His work integrates social, cognitive, and affective science with advanced quantitative and computational methods—including automated behavioral coding, machine learning, and structural equation modeling— to uncover the nonverbal cues and visual mechanisms that guide social perception and leadership emergence. To establish the universality of his findings, Zak conducts research across contexts, including studies with children as young as two years old, and adults from small-scale traditional societies with minimal exposure to the western world. Zak’s work has been published in leading journals such as Psychological Science, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, and PNAS Nexus, and is currently supported by a Grant from by the University of Amsterdam’s Data Science Center.

When Zak isn’t working, you can find him traveling, playing basketball and Padel, refining his automated stock trading algorithm, or recording jazz on the trumpet and piano. Zak also enjoys when participants provide funny responses to open-ended questions. Here’s his favorite: