Pardis C. Sabeti, MD, PhD

Pardis C. Sabeti is a Professor at the Center for Systems Biology at Harvard University, Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, and an Associate Member of the Broad Institute. She graduated with an S.B. in Biology from MIT, an M.Sc. and D.Phil. from Oxford University, and an M.D. from Harvard Medical School, being the third woman ever to graduate summa cum laude.

Dr. Sabeti is an evolutionary geneticist with extensive expertise studying genetic diversity, developing algorithms to detect genetic signatures of natural selection, and carrying out genetic association studies. Her graduate work at Oxford University focused on host genetic factors in Plasmodium falciparum susceptibility and studying patterns of genetic diversity to identify rapidly evolving genes. At Harvard, she has developed novel methods to detect natural selection, and applied it to the entire human genome, finding many novel candidates.

Her lab focuses on detecting and characterizing signals of natural selection in humans and pathogens and has recently identified candidate genes associated with natural selection for Lassa Fever virus infection in populations in Nigeria, recently published in Nature. Pardis's awards and fellowships include the Rhodes Scholarship, the Soros Fellowship, L'Oreal For Women in Science Fellowship, the Damon Runyon Cancer Foundation Post-doctoral fellowship, the Burroughs Wellcome Career Award in Biomedical Sciences, and the Packard Foundation Fellowship for Science and Engineering. Pardis is also the lead singer and bassist of the alternative rock band Thousand Days.