Colette Van Laar is Full Professor of Social Psychology at the University of Leuven (KU Leuven, Belgium). She received her MA in social psychology from the University of Amsterdam (Netherlands) and her Ph.D. as a Fulbright scholar from the University of California, Los Angeles. She worked as Postdoc, Assistant Professor and Associate Professor in Social and Organizational Psychology at Leiden University (Netherlands), and spent a year as a Visiting Scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation (New York).

She has published widely on social psychological factors and processes that transfer negative group stereotypes and prejudice into lower outcomes, and on contact processes between groups. Her work focuses on numerous groups, including women in traditionally male-dominated fields, ethnic/religious/language minority groups, lower social class groups, and groups facing specific stereotypes such as the elderly and those who smoke, but also on men in HEED fields traditionally dominated by women (HEED: Health care, Elementary Education and the Domestic sphere). For her work she has received numerous large grants, including an Odysseus Grant (FWO) and a VIDI grant (NWO).