Pardis Sabeti
Assistant Professor, Harvard University

Pardis Sabeti is an Assistant Professor at the Center for Systems Biology at Harvard University, Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, and an Associate Member of the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT. She 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. Sabeti completed her undergraduate degree at MIT and continued her education at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, before returning to earn her medical degree from Harvard Medical School where she was only the third woman ever to graduate summa cum laude. Her graduate work at Oxford University focused on host genetic factors in Plasmodium falciparum malaria 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 now focuses on detecting and characterizing signals of natural selection in humans and pathogens.