Maky Zanganeh, who’s 54, has followed an unusual path to become a biotech CEO. She was born in Tehran, Iran, the youngest of three girls, to architect parents and was eight years old when the Shah was overthrown in early 1979. The following year, the Iran-Iraq war began. “We constantly had to face the fear of bombing,” she wrote in her 2021 memoir, The Magic of Normal. “We never knew if the bombs would hit our home or not.” When she was about 11 years old, a friend of her father’s in Germany helped get the family German visas so they could leave Iran. The difficulty was getting a flight out of Tehran, because airports were often closed. Zanganeh and her parents ended up flying to Germany via Austria, she recounts in her memoir. They lived in Oldenburg, a small town in northern Germany near Hamburg, and she learned German. Her parents ended up returning to Iran, but Zanganeh stayed in Germany for high school, first living with a friend and then with an uncle.

Both of her sisters ended up going to medical school in Strasbourg, France, so Zanganeh’s father encouraged her to attend university there as well, which meant she had to learn French. She studied dentistry at the University of Strasbourg, with a focus on pediatric dentistry, and graduated in 1995, but wasn’t convinced she wanted a career as a dentist. In 1997, an Iranian friend was working in Europe for U.S. robotic surgery company Computer Motion, whose CEO was Bob Duggan. Zanganeh became fascinated with the work and took a job as a coordinator for Europe for the company–while also getting an MBA degree from Schiller University, a U.S. school with a program in Strasbourg. She was eventually promoted to Computer Motion’s head of Europe and Middle East and then in 2002 to global vice president for training and education, which resulted in a move to its headquarters in Santa Barbara, California. The following year, competitor Intuitive Surgical acquired Computer Motion and Zanganeh left the company.

She ended up working with Duggan at his investment firm, Robert Duggan & Associates, as vice president of business development, and that led to their next chapter. In searching for investments, they landed on small publicly-traded drug developer Pharmacyclics, first investing in 2004. The company struggled to get a drug approved and Duggan took over running it in 2008 after the board resigned. Zanganeh became vice president of business development that year and in 2012, the chief operating officer. Pharmacyclics hit success with a drug called Imbruvica, which was approved to treat a blood cancer, chronic lymphocytic leukemia. In 2015, pharma heavyweight AbbVie bought Pharmacyclics for $21 billion in cash and shares.