Pat Cline was the founding director of the AUIS Entrepreneurship Initiative and spent more than a decade in education and entrepreneur development, as well as growing the local start-up ecosystem. Prior to coming to Iraq, Pat was a business development consultant in Ethiopia and Small Enterprise Development volunteer in the Peace Corps in Cameroon. He has an MBA from the Kenan-Flagler Business School at The University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill and a BS in Financial Management from Clemson University.
Emily Burlinghaus served as Program Manager at AEI from 2017-2019 and helped get the Entrepreneurship Initiative off the ground. Prior to starting work at AUIS, she worked as a research assistant at The Washington Institute for Near East Policy in Washington, D.C. She graduated from New York University with a B.A. in Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies, where she studied Persian and U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East.