Author Profile SRBE

Levi Meir Clancy is an Erbil-based researcher, developer, and content creator. This database's entire codebase and all articles within are original work, managed by Foundation of Ours.

I am pursuing my master's degree in Applied Demography at Pennsylvania State University, focusing my research on minorities affairs in the autonomous Kurdistan Region of Iraq and particularly on the Ezidi and Jewish worlds.

Levi's baccalaureate is in Microbiology, Immunology, and Molecular Genetics (MIMG) from UCLA. Rather than supporting a career in laboratory science, this degree served as a foundation for a broader scope of analytical and methodical research.

Rather than go on to work in medicine, my degree in life sciences instead opened my interest in how the scientific method can be used stress-test hypotheses in different disciplines like demography and sociology, so that ideas and proposals may develop into frameworks and theories.

Upon graduating from UCLA, Levi moved to the Kurdistan Region in 2014 and began working at the polling company YouGov. In a team focused on analytics and surveys, Levi provided software solutions to supercharge analysts' ability to process magnitudes more content than was possible before.

In 2019, he left his career at YouGov to focus on research and advocacy. He focuses on minorities affairs, especially the concerns of the communities of Ezidis and Jews from Kurdistan. His research is more oriented toward Ezidis, while his advocacy includes traveling between Erbil and Jerusalem to liaise vis-à-vis officials in Israel and the Kurdistan Region. He is also the founder of Foundation of Ours, a synagogue devoted to Jewish expression in the Kurdistan Region.

During my professional and personal journey over the last several years, I enrolled in the Applied Demography program at Penn State to gain potential and authority in the academic world.

Upon completing his master's degree within two years, Levi plans to begin applying his research increasingly onto public policy. Currently, his research informs community-level advocacy such as events, seminars, and articles. By being able to provide robust insights informed by a formal understanding of demographic principles, he hopes to be able to highlight challenges and provide recommendations for policy.

Within five years, Levi plans to have consolidated his work into a formal institution: a physical space for Foundation of Ours. In addition to its core religious purpose, he hopes it provides Museum of Ours. Upon developing a robust career, the Museum can serve as an owned platform for further research and dissemination, as well as grassroots education and activism. The mission statement for the Museum is as follows,

Museum of Ours is inclusive of all communities in and near the Kurdistan Region and provides eye-opening exhibitions, discussions, and publications that apply historiography, museology, and demography to counter misinformation and bias.