Pardis C. Sabeti

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.

Her family fled Iran in October 1978, shortly before the Iranian Revolution, when Sabeti was two years old, and found sanctuary in Florida. As a child, Sabeti wanted to be a flower-shop owner, novelist, or doctor. However, she was most passionate about math.

Sabeti went to Trinity Preparatory School in Florida. In high school, she was a National Merit Scholar, class president, valedictorian, and member of the Varsity tennis team.

Sabeti attended 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." and was advised by Eric Lander, and initiated the school's larger pre-orientation programming.

Sabeti was selected as Rhodes Scholar and completed a masters in human biology followed by doctoral work in evolutionary genetics in 2002, at New College, Oxford, earning a M.Sc. and D.Phil. She received a Doctor of Medicine (M.D.) at Harvard Medical School in 2006 summa cum laude. She was the third woman to receive this honor. The Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowships for New Americans supported her medical studies. Sabeti initially planned to enter medicine and become a doctor, but she decided to pursue research instead after completing medical school and discovering she preferred research to medicine.

Infectious disease In 2014, having worked for a decade together in West Africa on Lassa fever and other infectious diseases, Sabeti and Christian Happi, a Cameroonian 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. They also showed the virus was mutating to be able to infect human cells more easily.

Sabeti's team continued to support outbreak response, developing and deploying genomic and computational tools to elucidate the origins, evolution, and community transmission of viruses. During the Zika epidemic in 2016, Sabeti's team assembled the largest sequencing study of the virus and showed the virus was circulating undetected for many months. During the 2018 Lassa fever outbreak in Nigeria, her and Happi's team rapidly sequenced the virus on ground in the country, providing real-time feedback to the Nigeria CDC on the origins and spread of the outbreak. During COVID-19, her team led genomic investigations that elucidated the first superspreader events, variants of concern, and transmission from vaccinated individuals. In 2019, Sabeti and Happi's teams were "awarded funding from the TED Audacious Project to build Sentinel, a pandemic pre-emption and response system."

Other contributions Her lab developed a family of statistical tests to detect and characterize correlations in datasets of any kind, maximal information non-parametric exploration (MINE). In February 2021 Sabeti co-authored a paper on how a certain level of COVID-19 anti-bodies may provide lasting protection against the virus, studying 4300 employees of SpaceX with its CEO Elon Musk.

Outreach and teaching In May 2015, she delivered a TED Talk, called "How we'll fight the next deadly virus." In September 2021, Sabeti joined the YouTube channel Crash Course to host its series on Outbreak Science. Sabeti hosted the Against All Odds video series with the goal of explaining statistics to high school and college students. Sabeti is an annual participant in the Distinguished Lecture Series at the acclaimed Research Science Institute at MIT for high school students.

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.

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.

As co-leader of the Sentinel pandemic prevention project, Sabeti's initiative ws selected for the MacArthur Foundation 100& Change Award to transform infectious disease prevention and surveillance .

In 2026, she was elected to the National Academy of Sciences.

Personal life Sabeti is the lead singer and songwriter for the rock band Thousand Days.

On 17 July 2015, Sabeti suffered a near-fatal accident at a conference in Montana. Crash Course - Outbreak Science Host (15 episodes)