Pardis Christine Sabeti is an Iranian-Americancomputational biologist, medical geneticist and evolutionary geneticist. She developed a bioinformatic statistical method which identifies sections of the genome that have been subject to natural selection and an algorithm which explains the effects of genetics on the evolution of disease. In 2014, Sabeti was part of a team led by Christian Happi, a Cameroonian geneticist, which used advanced genomic sequencing technology to identify a single point of infection from an animal reservoir to a human in the Ebola outbreak in West Africa. RNA changes suggests that the first human infection was followed by exclusive human to human transmissions. The work led her to be named one of TIME Magazine's Persons of the Year in 2014, and one of the TIME 100 most influential people in 2015. Sabeti is a full 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. She is the head of the Sabeti Lab. Sabeti is 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. Her show is included in many high school statistics curriculums, including the Research Statistics 1 Course at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology.
Early life and education
Sabeti was born in 1975 in Tehran, Iran, to Nasrin and Parviz Sabeti. Her father came from a Baha'i 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. Sabeti went on to study biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology 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 University of 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
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." As a graduate student at Oxford and postdoctoralfellow with Eric Lander at the Broad Institute, Sabeti developed a family of statistical tests for positive selection that look for common genetic variants found on unusually long haplotypes. Her tests, extended haplotype homozygosity, the long-range haplotype test, and cross population extended haplotype homozygosity, 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, and a family of statistical tests to detect and characterize correlations in datasets of any kind, maximal information non-parametic exploration. Sabeti created a series of videos with the goal of explaining statistics to high school and college students.
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.
