Pardis Sabeti

Pardis Christine Sabeti (born December 25, 1975) is an American computational biologist, medical geneticist, and evolutionary geneticist. She is a professor in the Center for Systems Biology and Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University and on the faculty of the Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and is an institute member at the Broad Institute and an investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

In 2014, Sabeti and Christian Happi, a Cameroonian-Nigerian geneticist, and their teams launched the African Center of Excellence for Genomics of Infectious Disease (ACEGID) to enhance pathogen surveillance and education in Africa. Their efforts in the Ebola outbreak in West Africa helped identify the first cases in Sierra Leone and Nigeria, and advanced genomic sequencing technology to identify a single point of infection from an animal reservoir to a human. RNA changes further suggested that the first human infection was followed by exclusive human to human transmissions.

Sabeti was named one of Time Magazine 's Persons of the Year in 2014 (Ebola Fighters), and one of the Time 100 most influential people in 2015. Her continued efforts including during the COVID-19 pandemic led her to receive a Time 100 Impact Award and to be inducted into the National Academy of Medicine. She is also the lead singer and a writer for the rock band Thousand Days   and is also the current host of the educational series Against All Odds: Inside Statistics sponsored by Annenberg Learner and a Crash Course on Outbreak Science.

Early life and education
Sabeti was born in 1975 in Tehran, Iran, to Nasrin and Parviz Sabeti. Her father came from a Baháʼí Faith family but never officially joined as a member and was the deputy in SAVAK, Iran's intelligence agency, and a high ranking security official in Shah's regime. She had a sister, Parisa, who was 2 years older. Growing up, Parisa taught Pardis the course material she had learned the year before in school, leading Pardis to be "almost two years ahead of her classmates" when the school year began.

Her family fled Iran in October 1978, shortly before the Iranian Revolution, when Sabeti was two years old, and found sanctuary in Florida. Growing up in Orlando, Sabeti wanted to be a flower-shop owner, novelist, or doctor. However, she was most passionate about math. Throughout her childhood and into college, Sabeti played competitive tennis. Sabeti went to Trinity Preparatory School in Central Florida. In high school, she was a National Merit Scholar and participated on USA Today’s All-USA High School Academic Team. She additionally attributes part of her inspiration towards medical science to the 1995 movie Outbreak.

Sabeti went on to study biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) where she was a member of the varsity tennis team and class president, graduating in 1997 with a major in biology and a "perfect 5.0 average." At MIT, she began her research career in David Bartel's laboratory and also worked in Eric Lander's laboratory, created the Freshman Leadership Program, and worked as a teaching assistant. She was then a Rhodes Scholar at New College, Oxford, and completed her doctorate in evolutionary genetics in 2002, and graduated summa cum laude with a Doctor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School in 2006, being the third woman to receive this honor since the school had begun accepting female students. The Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowships for New Americans supported her graduate studies. Initially, Sabeti planned to enter medicine and become a doctor; however, she decided to pursue research instead after completing medical school and discovering she preferred research to medicine.

Career and research
As a graduate student at Oxford and postdoctoral fellow with Eric Lander at the Broad Institute, Sabeti developed a family of statistical tests that identify regions of the genome under positive natural selection, by identifying common genetic variants found on unusually long haplotypes. Her tests, extended haplotype homozygosity (EHH), the long-range haplotype (LRH) test, and cross population extended haplotype homozygosity (XP-EHH), are designed to detect advantageous mutations whose frequency in human populations has risen rapidly over the last 10,000 years. As a faculty member at Harvard, Sabeti and her group have developed a statistical test to pinpoint signals of selection, the Composite of Multiple Signals (CMS), and a family of statistical tests to detect and characterize correlations in datasets of any kind, maximal information non-parametric exploration (MINE). Sabeti created a series of videos with the goal of explaining statistics to high school and college students. Sabeti has via her collaboration with Michael Mitzenmacher an Erdős number of 3.

In February 2021 Sabeti co-authored a paper in Nature Communications on how a certain level of COVID-19 anti-bodies may provide lasting protection against the virus. The paper was based on blood samples provided voluntarily by 4300 employees of SpaceX crediting also its CEO Elon Musk.

Sabeti is an annual participant in the Distinguished Lecture Series at the acclaimed Research Science Institute at MIT for high school students. In May 2015, she delivered a TED Talk, called "How we'll fight the next deadly virus." "Her team was recently awarded funding from the TED Audacious Project to build Sentinel, a pandemic pre-emption and response system." In September 2021, Sabeti joined the YouTube channel Crash Course to host its series on Outbreak Science.

Awards and honors
Sabeti was the 2012 recipient of Smithsonian magazine's American Ingenuity Award in the Natural Sciences category. In 2014, she received the Vilcek Prize for Creative Promise in Biomedical Science. She is a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader and a National Geographic Emerging Explorer.

In addition to being named one of Time Magazine 's Persons of the Year in 2014 (Ebola Fighters), Sabeti was listed as one of Time Magazine 's 100 most influential people in 2015, and was awarded the Time 100 Impact Award in 2022. Sabeti was on the list of the BBC's 100 Women announced on 23 November 2020.

In 2015, Sabeti was selected for the prestigious Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator award. She has also received a Burroughs Wellcome Fund Career Award in the Biomedical Sciences, a Packard Foundation award in Science and Engineering, and an NIH Director's New Innovator Award, and a L'Oréal for Women in Science Fellowship.

Sabeti was inducted in the National Academy of Medicine in 2020.

Personal life
Sabeti is the lead singer and songwriter for the rock band Thousand Days. In her spare time, Sabeti enjoys playing volleyball and participates in Harvard's summer volleyball league.

On July 17, 2015, Sabeti suffered a near-fatal accident at a conference in Montana. She was a passenger in an ATV that went over a cliff, and catapulted onto boulders. She shattered her pelvis and knees, and sustained a brain injury. She completed rehab to return to teaching.

Filmography

 * Against All Odds ... Host (32 episodes)
 * Crash Course - Outbreak Science Host (15 episodes)