Marie-Noëlle AbiYaghi is the co-director of the Centre for Social Science Research and Action (CeSSRA).

She joined the centre in 2014, and has initiated and institutionalized the research axis of the centre, maintaining synergies between the academic and the practitioner fields. She ensures the scientific rigor of the contextualised research produced by a multidisciplinary team of scholars, while facilitating the insertion of homegrown research within global theoretical debates and fora. 

She has previously worked in academia, as well as in international organisations.
As a scholar, she specialises in the sociology of political processes, contentious politics, and the social question in the MENA.  

Marie-Noëlle holds a PhD in Political Science from the Université Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne, France.