Biography
Pardis Sabeti is a core institute member of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, 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 T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and an investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.
The Sabeti lab has pioneered genomic and computational technologies for detecting, tracking, and containing deadly pathogens, including Ebola, Zika, Lassa, SARS-CoV-2, and Plasmodium falciparum malaria. During the 2014 Ebola epidemic in West Africa, Sabeti’s team generated the first large-scale genomic dataset of a high-risk pathogen outbreak, led the field in making outbreak data available publicly in real-time, and showed that the Ebola virus was transmitting from human-to-human and mutating to do so more easily. During the COVID-19 pandemic, they led genomic investigations that elucidated the first superspreader events, variants of concern, and transmission from vaccinated individuals.
Sabeti co-founded the African Center of Excellence in Genomics of Infectious Disease (ACEGID) with Christian Happi in 2014, and together launched the TED-Audacious funded Sentinel pandemic preemption system in West Africa in 2022. With the Massachusetts Department of Health, the Sabeti lab leads the CDC-funded New England Pathogen Genomic Centers of Excellence (PGCoE).
Trained as a computational geneticist, Sabeti and her lab have also developed some of the most powerful algorithms and molecular tools to mine the human genome for genetic variation important for human health and history. They have further created transformative methods for gene delivery of new biomedicines, allowing them to target specific tissues in the body.
Sabeti has been dedicated to training and capacity building throughout. ACEGID and Sentinel have trained over 1,600 frontline scientists from 53 of 54 African countries. She serves as the CDC PGCoE’s educational content lead, and her lab has trained public health workforce across the U.S. She co-created Operation Outbreak, an outbreak prevention and preparedness curriculum and Bluetooth-based outbreak simulation already in 24 U.S. states and four countries. Sabeti has taught countless students at Harvard and online including through the Against All Odds statistics course and a Crash Course on outbreak science.
Sabeti is a member of the National Academy of Medicine. Her honors include TIME magazine’s “Person of the Year” as one of the Ebola fighters, 100 Most Influential People, and Impact award. They also include World Economic Forum Young Global Leader, National Geographic Emerging Explorer, Smithsonian Magazine American Ingenuity Award for Natural Science, NIH Innovator, and NHGRI’s inaugural Outstanding Award for Enhancing Diversity Equity Inclusion and Accessibility.
Sabeti is a co-founder of SHERLOCK Biosciences and serves on the Board of its 221B Foundation, aiming to bring at-cost point-of-need diagnostics to low and middle income countries. She is a co-founder of Delve Bio, and serves on the boards of Danaher Corporation and Polaris Genomics.
Born in Tehran, Sabeti immigrated to the United States at the age of two. She completed her undergraduate degree in biology at MIT, her master’s and doctorate at the University of Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. and her medical degree from Harvard Medical School summa cum laude as a Soros Fellow.
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