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 560 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. He also wrote a book: Dangerous Fishes of the Eastern and Southern Arabian Peninsula, which is published by Springer, Germany and it is available online. Now he is editing two books for Springer, Germany, these are: (1) The Arabian seas (Arabian/Persian Gulf, Sea of Oman, North Arabian Sea, Gulf of Aden, the Red Sea) Biodiversity, Environment Challenges and Conservation Measures; and (2) Tigris and Euphrates Rivers: their environment from headwaters to mouth.
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 from the 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, which will be published by the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries in Oman. He also published over 80 papers on fish fauna of Oman, Iraq, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia. In 2013, he broadened his scientific contact and started to collaborate with over 50 scientists from more than 40 countries around the world in research dealing with different aspects of fish taxonomy and ichthyology.