Pardis Sabeti

برديس ثابتي

Pardis Christine Sabeti (born 25 December 1975) is an Iranian-American computational biologist, medical geneticist and evolutionary geneticist, a professor at Harvard University and a core institute member at the Broad Institute. She developed statistical tests that detect regions of the genome under natural selection, led genomic work on the West African Ebola and Lassa fever outbreaks, was one of Time's Persons of the Year in 2014 and a Time 100 honoree in 2015, and was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2026.

Depth

At a glance

Roles
Scientist
Region
Persia & Central Asia
Identifiers
Wikidata
Review

Life in time

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Place in the story

    Unknown (unknown)

    Roles are dated and sourced; the museum describes the act and attributes the judgement.

    Early life and education

    Sabeti was born in Tehran to Nasrin and Parviz Sabeti; her family fled Iran in October 1978, shortly before the Iranian Revolution, when she was two, and settled in Florida. She attended Trinity Preparatory School, where she was a National Merit Scholar and valedictorian, then MIT, graduating in 1997 with a perfect grade average. As a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford she took a master's in human biology and a doctorate in evolutionary genetics (2002), and in 2006 she received her M.D. from Harvard Medical School summa cum laude. 1 2

    Career and research

    As a graduate student at Oxford and a postdoctoral fellow at the Broad Institute, Sabeti developed a family of statistical tests — extended haplotype homozygosity and its successors — that identify regions of the genome under positive natural selection. With Christian Happi and their teams she worked for a decade on Lassa fever in West Africa and in 2014 launched the African Center of Excellence for Genomics of Infectious Disease (ACEGID); during the West African Ebola outbreak her team's sequencing helped identify the first cases in Sierra Leone and Nigeria and traced the epidemic's spread. Her group later worked on Zika, the 2018 Lassa outbreak in Nigeria and COVID-19, and co-leads the Sentinel pandemic-preemption system. 1

    Recognition

    Sabeti received Smithsonian magazine's American Ingenuity Award in 2012 and the Vilcek Prize for Creative Promise in Biomedical Science in 2014. She was one of Time's Persons of the Year in 2014 (the Ebola Fighters), appeared in the Time 100 in 2015, received a Time 100 Impact Award in 2022, was inducted into the National Academy of Medicine in 2020, and was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2026. She hosts the statistics series Against All Odds and Crash Course's Outbreak Science, and is the lead singer of the rock band Thousand Days. 1 3

    Religion

    Her faith is recorded as unknown. No source names an affiliation for Sabeti herself. The English article states that her father "came from a Baháʼí Faith family but never officially joined as a member"; the Persian and Arabic articles repeat the same statement of her father's background, and an article and its translations are one source family. The Urdu text, the editions' categories and Wikidata — which carries no religion value at all — say nothing about her own belief. A parent's family background is not an attestation of the subject's affiliation, so no value is recorded. 1 2 3 4

    Sources

    • The defined source entities cited above, recorded in data/source/.
    • Revisions of this article must be dated, and must name the source that changed each fact.

    Sources

    1. Pardis Sabeti — English Wikipedia
    2. Pardis Sabeti — Persian Wikipedia
    3. Pardis Sabeti — Arabic Wikipedia
    4. Pardis Sabeti — Wikidata Q3063122
    • Pardis Sabeti — Urdu Wikipedia
    Cite this page

    islam.museum contributors. “Pardis Sabeti”. islam.museum, https://islam.museum/en/person/pardis-sabeti/. CC BY-SA 4.0. Last updated 2026-10-27.

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