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Home > Prizes > Prize Recipients > Pardis Sabeti

Pardis Sabeti

2014 Vilcek Prize for Creative Promise in Biomedical Science

Location

Cambridge, MA

Title

Associate Professor, Harvard Medical School

Area(s) of Research

Immunology; viruses; genetics

Education

Harvard Medical School (MD);
Oxford University (MSc);
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (BSc)

Country of Birth

Iran

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bioinformatics biomedical science computational biology genetics genome genome sequencing immunology infectious diseases Iran Time 100 virology viruses
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A portrait of Pardis Sabeti against a neutral grey background.
Photo courtesy of Morgan Miller/Pardis Sabeti

Pardis Sabeti discovered her love for math under the preschool tutelage of her older sister, Parisa — and she’s been ahead of the curve ever since.

As part of her research  into human genetic resistance to malaria at Oxford, Sabeti worked to fine-tune an algorithm she had developed to identify more recent changes in the human genome. But her approach was considered offbeat. Undeterred, she kept at it when she returned to Boston for med school, exploring neighborhoods of the human genome looking for rapid changes in a population’s DNA, signals of the beneficial results of natural selection.

By 2002, she had a working model of her algorithm. She’d found a trait that “had to be a result of natural selection — [one] that likely helped the population I was looking at cope with malaria better than others.” Her discovery helps scientists understand how humans have evolved to become resistant to infectious diseases, and how the microbes underlying these diseases evolve to develop drug resistance. In turn, this information could help us to defeat these microbes and the resistance they develop.

Sabeti attributes her perseverance to her background. On the run from the fundamentalist regime in 1978 Iran, she and her family left Tehran and arrived in the United States and started life over again. Throughout, her parents remained strong and optimistic; their example is what motivates her to “work hard and always maintain positivity in the face of all odds.

Sabeti has continued to take on big challenges, notably the deadly Lassa fever virus. At her core, though, she remains a computational scientist, and conducts her research in that vein at her lab at Harvard, where she’s an associate professor. But now she also realizes that “what makes this work truly meaningful is its impact on human health.”

Awards and Accomplishments

  • Burroughs Wellcome Fund Career Award in the Biomedical Sciences
  • Packard Foundation Award in Science and Engineering
  • NIH Innovator Award
  • Smithsonian American Ingenuity Award for Natural Sciences

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bioinformatics biomedical science computational biology genetics genome genome sequencing immunology infectious diseases Iran Time 100 virology viruses

Jury Members

2014 Vilcek Prize for Creative Promise in Biomedical Science

Heran Darwin

Associate Professor of Microbiology, New York University School of Medicine

Laurie Dempsey

Senior Editor, Nature Immunology

Peter Palese

Professor and Chair, Microbiology, Mount Sinai School of Medicine

Jan Vilcek

Professor of Microbiology, New York University School of Medicine

Leslie Vosshall

Chemers Family Associate Professor, The Rockefeller University

Nicholas Wade

Science Department, The New York Times

Jedd Wolchok

Director of Immunotherapy, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center
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Related Prize Recipients

Hani Goodarzi

Hani Goodarzi receives the Vilcek Prize for Creative Promise in Biomedical Science for using modeling and computational methods to uncover novel molecular players and pathways and therapeutic targets in cancer metastasis and for developing sophisticated molecular tools for the early detection and monitoring of cancer.
Portrait of Hani Goodarzi

Michaela Gack

Michaela Gack receives the Vilcek Prize for Creative Promise in Biomedical Science for uncovering molecular mechanisms by which the human immune system triggers antiviral defenses, and for identifying potential vaccine and drug targets for emerging infectious diseases.
Portrait of Michaela Gack

Houra Merrikh

Houra Merrikh receives the Vilcek Prize for Creative Promise in Biomedical Science for demonstrating how conflicts between life-sustaining cellular machines involved in genome duplication and gene expression can accelerate evolution.
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