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Pardis Sabeti, M.D., D.Phil.

Pardis Sabeti is an institute member of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard and a leader in the Broad’s Infectious Disease and Microbiome Program. She is also a professor at the Center for Systems Biology and the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University, a professor in the Department of Immunology and Infectious Disease at Harvard School of Public Health, and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator.

Sabeti is a computational geneticist whose lab develops powerful methods and tools for advancing genome biology and medicine. She has created some of the most widely used algorithms to mine our genome for instances of human adaptation, and created powerful molecular tools to elucidate their underlying biology. She has contributed to widely varying fields — such as viral sequencing, information theory, rural disease surveillance, and education efforts in West Africa — to create comprehensive approaches for detecting, containing, and treating deadly infectious diseases. The microbes she studies include Lassa virus, Ebola virus, Zika virus, Plasmodium falciparum malaria, and Babesiosis microtia. She has invested in capacity building and education, enabling the first diagnosis of Ebola in Sierra Leone and Nigeria, training over fifty African scientists through summer-long educational programs, and establishing genome centers in West Africa.

Sabeti is a World Economic Forum (WEF) Young Global Leader and a National Geographic Emerging Explorer. In 2014, she was named a TIME magazine “Person of the Year” as one of the Ebola fighters and in 2015 as one of TIME’s 100 Most Influential People. Her awards include the 2012 Smithsonian American Ingenuity Award for Natural Science, the Vilcek Prize for Creative Promise, the NIH Innovator Award, the Packard Fellowship, an Ellis Island Medal of Honor, and the 2017 Richard Lounsbery Award from the National Academy of Sciences. She has served on the MIT Board of Trustees and the National Academy of Sciences Committee on Women in Science, Medicine, and Engineering. She is an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine.

Born in Tehran, 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 from Harvard Medical School as a Soros Fellow.

January 2021