Rudy Abi Habib, PhD is an Associate Professor of Clinical Psychology at the Lebanese American University (LAU), a psychodynamic psychotherapist, trauma researcher, and academic leader whose work sits at the intersection of psychotraumatology, psychodynamic psychotherapy, attachment, dissociation, and cumulative trauma. His scholarship, clinical work, and institutional initiatives are unified by a sustained commitment to understanding and treating the psychological consequences of war, collective violence, developmental adversity, and repeated trauma, particularly within Lebanon and the wider Levant. Dr. Abi Habib is the Founder and director of the Institute of Psychotraumatology, an academic initiative dedicated to advancing research, training, and trauma-informed mental health practice in conflict-affected and trauma-exposed communities. Through this work, he has sought to build an interdisciplinary platform that integrates clinical psychology, psychotherapy, trauma studies, public education, and professional training, with a particular emphasis on culturally grounded and contextually responsive approaches to trauma in the Middle East. His leadership in psychotraumatology has focused not only on generating empirical knowledge, but also on creating sustainable structures for professional training, research dissemination, and applied clinical practice in a region marked by chronic instability, war exposure, and intergenerational suffering. He is also the Founder of Atlas - Center for Psychotherapy and Trauma Studies, a clinical and academic center devoted to psychotherapy, psychotraumatology, professional training, supervision, and psychological research. Conceived as a space that bridges clinical excellence, scholarly rigor, and ethical trauma-informed care, Atlas reflects Dr. Abi Habib’s broader vision of psychotherapy as both a therapeutic and intellectual practice, one that requires conceptual depth, cultural sensitivity, and sustained engagement with the lived realities of patients and communities. Through Atlas, he has worked to advance psychotherapy and trauma care not only as treatment modalities, but as frameworks for understanding the complex interplay between intrapsychic life, attachment, embodiment, violence, and social context. Dr. Abi Habib’s research program focuses on the mental health consequences of cumulative and collective trauma, with particular attention to posttraumatic stress, anxiety, depression, dissociation, resilience, reflective functioning, attachment, and coping. His work has examined the psychological aftermath of some of the most significant recent traumas affecting Lebanon and the region, including war-related violence, the Beirut Port explosion, displacement, repeated national crises, and indirect exposure to violence through media and collective sociopolitical upheaval. Across these studies, he has explored how repeated and layered adversity shapes emotional regulation, interpersonal functioning, trauma symptomatology, and long-term psychological adaptation. His scholarship is especially concerned with the ways in which trauma becomes not merely an acute event but a developmental, relational, embodied, and cumulative process that reorganizes subjectivity, meaning, and psychic life. A major strand of his work has centered on war and conflict-related trauma in children and adults, including trauma interventions with war-exposed youth, the role of resilience and mentalizing in posttraumatic outcomes, and the differential psychological impact of direct versus indirect trauma exposure. His broader research agenda also includes the intergenerational transmission of trauma, prenatal stress and trauma, developmental adversity, trauma and body image, and culturally specific manifestations of suffering and recovery in Arab and Levantine populations. Across these areas, he has consistently advocated for trauma research that is scientifically rigorous while remaining attentive to local histories, social realities, and the moral and political contexts in which trauma unfolds.