Michela Roberts is the development manager at the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington. She has more than a decade of experience working with local, national, and international nonprofit organizations and government agencies in policy and fundraising capacities. Prior to joining AGSIW, Roberts worked in development at a Washington, DC-based nonprofit social services organization, where she raised more than $2 million to support its critical programming.

She previously worked at an NGO in northern Iraq, where she developed and led the organization’s first refugee resettlement program. Roberts successfully resettled more than 350 Syrian Yazidi refugees from Iraq to Australia and trained Iraqi staff on how to maintain and manage the organization’s new Syrian Refugee Resettlement Program. Upon returning to the United States, she completed a yearlong research consultancy project, where she identified gaps in the U.S. Refugee Resettlement Program that, if addressed, could promote resilience in refugee children who resettled in the United States from Syria after 2011.

Roberts also worked in the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Division of Global HIV for five years, where she worked with senior staff and other global health agencies to help guide and implement the division’s overarching internal and external communications strategies. She developed and delivered briefings to key leadership, including the agency director, U.S. ambassadors traveling to countries significantly impacted by HIV/AIDS, and foreign ministries of health in countries receiving CDC support. She also developed and presented briefings and reports for the public, media outlets, and other stakeholders with the goal of increasing awareness and programmatic resources that went toward serving vulnerable populations in areas with high HIV burdens.

Roberts received her Master of Public Policy degree from Duke University, where she specialized in international conflict, security, and human rights.