Sara Sherbaji's PhD will explore fundamental questions of what makes humans unique and the role culture plays in our evolution.
I hope to expand our understanding of the human species and thereby make a world with fewer man-made tragedies.
Sara Sherbaji
Sara Sherbaji’s research explores fundamental questions of what makes humans unique and the role culture plays in our evolution. Her questions build on her Master’s dissertation, on her work as a psychology lab coordinator and on her experience of fleeing the Syrian war. She says: “Since leaving Syria during the war, my goal has been to try to understand human behaviour in its most fundamental aspects. What is it that makes people think and act, individually and communally, in the way that they do?”
Through the application of the principles and tools of the evolutionary sciences, she is looking to uncover ‘human nature’ in its broadest and most universal aspects, in particular our success as a species. She asks: “Is this to be attributed more to our powers of theoretical understanding, or to our ability to follow, transmit and refine cultural norms and practices?”
She adds: “I hope to expand our understanding of the human species and thereby make a world with fewer man-made tragedies.”
Early life
Sara [2024] was born in Riyadh in Saudi Arabia. Her parents had temporarily moved there, but a couple of years later moved back to Damascus where they are from and where she and her younger brother grew up.
Sara attended school in Damascus and learned how to read and write English. Neither of her parents had been to university and Sara’s mother, who suffers from an incurable degenerative eye condition – retinitis pigmentosa – which has rendered her blind, was particularly keen that her children continue their studies after school.
Nevertheless, Sara says she was not very studious at school. She found it boring, although she describes herself as ‘nerdy’ and academic. As the school curriculum was fairly narrow, she explored her academic interests outside school and read a lot, especially books grounded in philosophy.
When the war started in 2011, Sara was still at school. As the war escalated, she and her brother managed to leave the country to join their grandparents in the UAE and never went back. Their parents stayed in Syria for another year while their father tried to set up a new business in Dubai. In the UAE, she says, there was no time to sit and grieve for what she had lost. “We had to keep going,” she states.
Sara says: “It was such a beautiful place, such a friendly culture. We thought war would never happen to us. Then it hit and everything changed overnight. My family has lived there for generations in the oldest part of Damascus. Syrians didn’t usually leave and many of my family have stayed. But we have been lucky. We lost our family home and everything we owned, our cultural heritage, everything has been compromised, but our immediate family are okay.”
University
Sara had been unable to sit her final exams in Syria even though she had completed her course so she had to do a one-year transition course to get into university. She then applied to Heriot-Watt University’s branch campus in Dubai to study Psychology and from 2012 to 2016 she commuted there from Sharjah where her parents had moved. She had long been interested in Psychology, particularly cognitive psychology. It was there that her interest in taking an interdisciplinary approach to her studies began as she explored issues around cognition. Alongside her academic work and after, Sara had to work at odd jobs to support her family. She was also interested in mental health and made efforts to expand mental health awareness in the UAE.
Consultancy work
After graduating, Sara says she went around knocking on doors of psychology consultancies because she didn’t want to work for a corporate. She got a position at a brain training company, but found it difficult working there because she felt there wasn’t much evidence underpinning the techniques they used. She decided she needed to head back to the laboratory. As an undergraduate she had worked as a research assistant at the American University of Sharjah. She managed to get a position as a psychology lab coordinator and stayed for four years.
Sara was working with two supervisors: one was studying the cognitive science of religion and the other was investigating social identity theory and inter-group conflict. She fell in love with the cognitive science of religion and became fascinated by the evolution of religion and the benefits it brings in terms of social relationships, mental support and community as well as how it makes meaning and assuages threats to mortality, particularly in a Middle Eastern setting where religion is totally integrated into all aspects of life.
While doing that lab job Sara was the host of the Good Questions platform, set up by the government as a space to communicate science to the public. She is keen to make scientific ideas accessible to more people.
Master’s course
In 2021 Sara got married. She and her husband connected over their mutual interests in religion and philosophy. He was studying at Cambridge University at the time. When the two decided to marry, Sara moved to the UK where she did a Master’s in human evolution at University College London. She felt she needed to learn more about the science side of the science-religion equation and to understand the origins of human behaviour.
She studied part time and finally had time for herself. She says she really enjoyed the course and did very well. “It was the first time I was really interested in what I was studying. I felt it was my one shot to ask all my questions about how we came to be the way we are today,” she states, adding that the course was very interdisciplinary, covering everything from primatology to archaeology.
Her dissertation was on on the evolutionary puzzle of lifelong celibacy. Her findings built on those of her supervisor, Professor Ruth Mace, on the reproductive advantages of having a monk in the family in Gansu Province, China. Sara’s research focused on the co-evolution of marriage practices with religious celibacy: for instance, how a woman becoming a nun reduces competition for dowry in a family of daughters.
PhD
Sara finished her Master’s in early 2024, having got pregnant during the last part of the course. She is now on maternity leave with her daughter who was born in April. She applied to Cambridge after one of her UCL lecturers – Dr Mark Dyble – who shares her intellectual interests moved to Cambridge.
She will begin her PhD in Biological Anthropology on cumulative cultural evolution when her daughter is one, but did her Gates Cambridge orientation in October. Sara is interested in exploring how humans adapt to different habitats and ecosystems by accumulating culture over generations, which essentially means they don’t have to start again with every generation. “I want to understand what makes us so unique,” she says.
