Our Team

Emal Dusst

Senior Advisor

Emal is an investment professional at Sterling Partners (private equity). He was previously Head of Strategy & Corporate Planning at Cintana Education. Prior to that, he was Head of Strategy and Chief of Staff to Douglas Becker at Laureate Education, the largest international network of degree-granting higher education institutions. He was responsible for leading strategy and corporate development, driving various strategic and business development initiatives and for leading the Company’s B Corp certification when it became the largest B Corp in the world. 

Prior to Laureate, he was Director of Strategy and Planning at Saint-Gobain, a $60 billion French conglomerate, where he also led global business development for the company’s alternative energy business. Emal has also worked in investment banking and private equity.

Emal was previously Head of Strategy & Corporate Planning at Cintana Education. 

Emal serves or has served as a board member or observer on several education companies/institutions, including Coursera, the American University of Afghanistan, the World Affairs Council in DC and ReCoded, a United Nations-funded non-profit coding school for refugees. Additionally, he is a member of the Robert S. Brookings Society at the Brookings Institution, where he writes on global education trends, and a Board Advisor at The Aspen Institute’s workforce analytics initiative. Emal is also a Term Member at the Council on Foreign Relations. Emal holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Economics with a minor in German from UCLA and an MBA from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University.