Ilyas received his PhD on authoritarian learning in Egypt and Morocco during the Arab Uprisings from Humboldt University in Berlin. More recently he has focused on human rights, civic space, academic freedom, and fieldwork safety and ethics. At GPPi, he co-developed the Academic Freedom Index (AFi) and further refined guidelines for qualitative country case studies on academic freedom. He is a member of the advocacy advisory board of Scholars At Risk Europe and serves on the board of the Alliance for Critical and Solidary Scholarship. He is also a member of the Academic Freedom Committees at the British Middle Eastern Studies Association and the German Middle Eastern Studies Association and serves as an expert for the UNESCO efforts to measure implementation of the right to science. Ilyas has co-authored two books and contributed several op-eds, policy briefs and articles on academic freedom and fieldwork safety in academic journals and edited volumes. His research interests also include contemporary authoritarianism in the WANA Region and shrinking civic space.