Nearly three years ago, Ola Baker got a lifechanging call from Ahmad Sheikh Muhammad, head of the Galilee Society – the Arab National Society for Health Research and Services.

The society, based in northern Israel, had won a tender from the U.S.-Middle East Partnership Initiative (MEPI) to establish an accelerator for early-stage Arab startups in healthcare, biotech and environmental science. Would Baker want to be its CEO?

“It was like a dream come true for me,” says Baker, an Israeli Arab with degrees in biology and business administration.

She’d been a C-level manager at pharma companies for six years and then opened GrowOn, a boutique consultancy to help early-stage Arab healthcare startups overcome their considerable investment and business networking challenges. She also lectures on entrepreneurship at the Technion and Tel Aviv University.

Now, suddenly, Muhammad was offering her the management of ScienTech, the first accelerator targeted to help Arab founders turn scientific research knowledge into businesses.

Keep reading at israel21c.org.

The Technion Knowledge Center for Innovation is a partner of ScienTech.