Arab-Israeli MD tops her Technion class

Dr. Mais Ali Saleh graduated No. 1 in her class, although Hebrew is not her native language, while juggling work, studies, and getting married.

(By Avigayil Kadesh)

Mais Ali Saleh on graduation day, posing beside her

student research project

The newest staff obstetrician-gynecologist at Carmel Medical Center in Haifa is hardly the only Arab-Israeli physician on staff, nor the only female. Dr. Mais Ali Saleh’s main distinction is that she was the No. 1 student in the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology’s 2013 medical school graduating class.

“From the time I was five years old, I wanted to be a doctor,” she says. “I was never interested in anything else.”

By the time she was in 11th grade she had decided to go into OB/GYN. “Most women prefer a female doctor,” she explains in a phone interview during a few minutes stolen from her busy schedule. “With intimate problems such as urinary incontinence, they are embarrassed to go to a male doctor.”

Ali Saleh emphasizes that although people outside Israel may have the impression that Arab-Israeli students at Israel’s premier engineering and science university are rare, this is not the case.

“The Technion medical school has about 35 percent Arab-Israeli students,” she says. (In June 2013 the actual number was close to 50%, according to some sources; 22% of all medical students in Israel are Arabs) Overall, Arab students make up some 20% of the university’s student body, paralleling their numbers in the Israeli population. 

Nor is it unusual for a non-Jewish Technion student or faculty member to achieve star status. Last year’s Technion valedictorian was Arza Haddad, a Christian woman from a Lebanese family who earned a master’s degree in aeronautical engineering.

Another notable example is Prof. Hossam Haick, a chemical engineer at the Technion’s Russell Berrie Nanotechnology Institute and inventor of the NA-NOSE device that detects serious diseases by analyzing breath samples. A Christian Arab, he was raised in Nazareth.
Ali Saleh, 27, grew up nearby in the mixed Muslim and Christian village of Yafa an-Naseriyye (“Jaffa of Nazareth”) and at first struggled with the Technion’s Hebrew classes. Though she had learned the language at school, it took awhile for her to become fluent.

Better opportunities

Ali Saleh could have avoided the language barrier by studying in Jordan, but she says the Israeli medical schools are of higher quality and the opportunities after graduation are superior. Earning excellent grades on the high school matriculation exams and the psychometric college entrance exams, in addition to her personal interview, put her ahead of the fierce competition. 
“Those who can't meet the admission requirements are forced to study abroad,” she says. “Getting high achievements in the psychometric exam doesn't make you a better student; you need to solve many complicated questions in a very limited time, and this exam constitutes a major obstacle for both the Jewish and Arab students.”

Impressive as it is that she gained admission to the Technion’s Ruth and Bruce Rappaport Faculty of Medicine and overcame her linguistic difficulties, it is even more impressive that she rose to the top so quickly. In her first year, she was chosen by the Knesset as one of eight students from around the country to receive an academic award of excellence.

She did this while juggling medical school and work. Ali Saleh was an instructor in a psychometric preparation course, an educator in the Technion’s Student Advancement Center and a research assistant in the clinical biochemistry laboratory. And she also got married while in the midst of her studies, to Technion Medical School alumnus Dr. Nidal Mawasi.

Ali Saleh credits good time management for her extraordinary achievements.

“I think the main thing is to divide time wisely between study, work and personal life,” she says. Unlike many of her fellow students, she never crammed for tests or pulled all-nighters.
“I didn’t just learn material right before the test. I was constantly reviewing. If you study little by little, you internalize it better. And I made time to have fun. At four or five o’clock I’d finish studying and close the books and go to the sea.”

Ali Saleh comes from a family and hometown that fully supported her ambitions. Her own mother got a college degree later in life and now is studying for a doctorate in education.
Now that she’s a mom (her first baby – a girl – was born in October 2013), Ali Saleh says her goal is to continue working at the hospital part time and spend the rest of her working hours in a community practice.

Guess Who Got First Place in the Technion Med School?

Guess who graduated first in this year's medical school class at the Technion, Israel's version of M.I.T.? The answer will surprise you. It's a 27-year-old stereotype-buster: a charming, feminist, smart, open-minded and observant Islamic woman named Mais Ali-Saleh who grew up in a small village outside of Nazareth, in Israel's Galilee.

Ali-Selah's academic excellence not only marks her own personal achievement but also proves that contrary to propaganda spouted by proponents of the BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) Movement -- whose latest convert is Stephen Hawking -- an academic boycott of Israel is the wrong approach to solving the Israel-Arab conflict. Moreover, it ultimately hurts the very people it claims to help. Ali-Selah put it best when she said, "An academic boycott of Israel is a passive move, and it doesn't achieve any of its purported objectives."

After Ali-Selah's first class at the Technion, in Haifa, northern Israel, she was ready to call it quits. Ali-Selah had studied Hebrew from elementary school through high school but in the predominantly Arab area around Nazareth, she rarely used Hebrew and her vocabulary was limited. During Ali-Selah's first Chemistry lecture, she couldn't understand why her professor kept talking about malls. What did shopping malls have to do with Chemistry? She then realized the professor was speaking about moles, a standard scientific unit for measuring quantities of minute entities.

For more on this story go to http://www.huffingtonpost.com/diana-bletter/guess-whos-valedictorian_b_3602610.html?utm_hp_ref=tw    

GPS for Brain Surgeons

A line of products trusted by neurosurgeons and neuroscience researchers on six continents was developed by a Christian-Arab couple in Nazareth, Israel.

Abigail Klein Leichman – Israel 21C

Two Arab Nazarenes meet at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, fall in love, get married and move back home to start a high-tech business financed only by the sale of their car.

Doesn’t sound like a recipe for success? Well, it worked out fine for Imad and Reem Younis, whose company Alpha Omega is a world leader in producing pioneering products for neurosurgery and neuroscience research.

Last June, Alpha Omega http://www.alphaomega-eng.com/was named the 2012 American Israeli Company of the Year by the American Israeli Chamber of Commerce in Atlanta, Georgia. One of its international sales and support offices in based in Alpharetta, near Atlanta.

Reem Younis, a civil engineer (her husband’s degree is in electrical engineering), explains: “Alpha Omega’s knowhow is ‘driving’ safely inside the brain with an electrode, recording neural activity, stimulating neural tissue, processing and analyzing the data.

“In simple terms, you can look at it as a GPS inside the brain that guides the neurosurgeon to the required location, where a permanent electrode is implanted. This treatment is supposed to eliminate disease symptoms, and the patient can go back to his or her normal life.”

The company’s recording and stimulation tools, which have both FDA (US) and CE (Europe) approvals, are helpful in two realms. Neuroscientists use them in the lab to understand more about the human brain, and neurosurgeons use them for treating patients with a variety of neural disorders such as Parkinson’s disease and dystonia, a nervous system disorder that causes involuntary muscles contractions and spasms.

“In Europe this method is used also for treating people with [clinical] depression,” says Younis.

Meeting future needs

Alpha Omega was established in 1993 in Nazareth, a Christian Arab city that recently hosted its first Startup Weekend event. The company’s sophisticated machinery is manufactured locally and sold through offices in the United States, Israel and Germany, as well as by sales representatives in China, Japan and South America.

The mainly Christian and Muslim Arab staff of 35 in Alpha Omega’s Nazareth headquarters are graduates of the Technion or Tel Aviv University.

During Global Entrepreneurship Week in November, Reem and Imad Younis went from one northern Arab municipality to another, explaining their company’s technology and entrepreneurship model to high school students with the goal of encouraging other innovators like themselves.

“We are 20 percent of the [Israeli] population and also need to be 20% of the Israeli high-tech scene, but we are not,” says Younis. “It’s closer to 1%. Alpha Omega is about bringing high-tech to Nazareth and giving employment to very highly qualified engineers.”

She says the company’s equipment is well known around the world for accuracy and stability. “We are in more than 100 hospitals and more than 500 labs on six continents. Our main market is, of course, the USA.”

Younis says one reason for the company’s success is its close relationship with the research community, particularly at the Hadassah University Medical Center in Jerusalem and other top researchers in Israel and beyond.

“Because Alpha Omega is involved in both the medical and research fields, we hear about new needs and trends,” says Younis. “We know where the market is leading in five or 10 years, so that our excellent teams will develop the appropriate systems for serving humanity and fulfilling the company’s mission.”