Mandy Terc is the Executive Director of the Middle East Research and Information Project (MERIP). Previously, she served as founding director of the Sheikh Faisal Center for Entrepreneurship in the Middle East at DePaul University where she developed joint programs and conferences between Chicago and Doha. Dr. Terc has studied the region’s new generation of entrepreneurs, from examining how entrepreneurship organizations impacted socio-economic stratification in Syria to looking at the role of young entrepreneurs in economic diversification in Qatar. She conducted 18 months of field research on language and entrepreneurship in Syria. She holds a PhD in linguistic anthropology from the University of Michigan.