by Invisible Light _________________________________________________ Invisible Light News Release



January 15, 2026 — Invisible Light celebrates a little over one-year since its Founding President, Dr. Yael Warshel, also assumed leadership over the Association of Middle East Children and Youth Studies (AMECYS).

Since November 2024, Dr. Warshel has advanced AMECYS’s global mission to foster interdisciplinary scholarship and exchange concerning the lives of children and youth across the Middle East, North Africa, the Gulf, and their diasporic communities.

Her dual leadership reinforces Invisible Light’s core mission—to realize the media, education, and communication rights of children living in or displaced by conflict—by bridging academic research with applied practice and policy impact.

Warshel brings extensive experience to this work, having previously served as Vice President of the American Institute for Maghrib Studies (AIMS), where she strengthened scholarship on Northwest Africa.

Founded in 2017, AMECYS is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit and the only international academic association dedicated to the study of Middle Eastern, North African and Gulf children and youth. With more than 400 members, it sponsors scholarly panels and awards, circulates research and teaching resources, and promotes public understanding about and by children and youth in the region and their diasporic communities.

Under Warshel’s leadership, AMECYS has undergone significant reform, routinization and expansion. She has revised the organization’s bylaws and governance structures, created advisory committees to support long-term sustainability and growth, and expanded the board through elections. She has also advanced inclusivity by broadening accessibility and strengthening disciplinary, linguistic, and geographic representation to ensure that AMECYS fulfills its mission of advancing scholarship not just about, but also by and for MENA children and youth. In addition, she has led the rebuilding of the organization’s website, strengthened its communications, and directed a successful membership drive. She has also spearheaded the launch of two mentorship programs: a traditional graduate mentorship initiative to support emerging scholarship in this growing subfield, and an “alternative-academic” mentorship program—scheduled to launch later this year—for scholars seeking to apply their expertise beyond academia.

She is also at work co-producing and organizing an edited volume and a major international conference, tentatively titled “Living in and Leaving the Nest: North African Young People Transitioning and Transiting In and Beyond Africa,” co-organized with Dr. Majid Hannoum (University of Kansas).

Together, these efforts strengthen the infrastructure for the emerging subfield of Middle Eastern, North African, and Gulf children and youth studies while advancing Invisible Light’s broader goal: transforming research on children in conflict zones into meaningful, real-world impact for peacebuilding, communication rights, and youth empowerment.

Warshel hopes to foster similar growth in scholarship across other regions, both comparatively and globally, with specific emphasis on vulnerable populations from, born of, and displaced by conflict zones, and specifically, on uses of media as tools of support and empowerment—the mission of Invisible Light and the research services it provides.