March 15, 2019
Pardis Sabeti is a Rhodes Scholar, rock musician, computational geneticist and one of Time magazine’s Persons of the Year for 2014 for her work leading the war against Ebola in Africa.
At the age of 44, she is still the lead singer and a writer for the rock band Thousand Days. And she is likely seen at a high school near you because her educational series “Against All Odds: Inside Statistics,” is shown in many high school statistics classes.
Sabeti was born in 1975 in Tehran, where her father was one of the senior officers of SAVAK, the Shah’s intelligence and security agency. He took his family out of Iran to Florida before the revolution collapsed the regime. She was only two when she arrived in the US.
The Sabeti family remained under the radar until Pardis won a Rhodes Scholarship on graduating from college, and her name drew the attention of Iranian-Americans.
Growing up in Orlando, Pardis wanted to be a florist, novelist or doctor. But she was most passionate about math, unlike most girls, and that led her to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she graduated with a perfect 5.0 average while playing varsity tennis and being elected class president.
She has since combined her interests in math and medicine to become one of the pre-eminent scientific researchers in the world with her base at Harvard.
In 2015, Time magazine listed her as one of the world’s 100 most influential people.
In the summer of 2015, she was riding in an all-terrain vehicle in Montana when it went over a cliff. She was catapulted onto boulders, shattering her pelvis and knees and causing a brain injury. She spent more than a year in rehab.
