Pardis Sabeti

Pardis Sabeti M.D., Ph.D., is a professor at the Center for Systems Biology and Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University and the Department of Immunology and Infectious Disease at the Harvard School of Public Health, an Institute Member of the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT, and an investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

Her computational genomic lab has contributed to widely varying fields — including human evolutionary biology, viral sequencing, information theory, rural disease surveillance, and education efforts in West Africa. The lab aims to create comprehensive approaches for detecting, containing, and treating deadly infectious diseases, including Lassa virus, Ebola virus, Zika virus, and Babesiosis microtia. Dr. Sabeti has invested in capacity building and education throughout the continent, enabling the first diagnoses of Ebola in Sierra Leone and Nigeria, training over 70 African scientists through summer-long educational programs, and establishing genome centers in West Africa.

Born in Tehran, Dr. Sabeti immigrated to the United States at the age of two. She completed her undergraduate degree in biology at MIT and her doctorate at Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar. After that, she obtained her medical degree summa cum laude from Harvard Medical School as a Soros Fellow. Dr. Sabeti has received numerous awards and honors including World Economic Forum (WEF) Young Global Leader, National Geographic Emerging Explorer, Smithsonian American Ingenuity Award for Natural Science, TIME’s “Person of the Year” as one of the Ebola fighters, and TIME’s “100 Most Influential.”

She is also the host of “Against All Odds,” which is included as part of the AP Statistics curriculum nationwide, and is the lead singer of the rock band Thousand Days.