Pardis Sabeti’s work on infectious disease, coronavirus

Wednesday, May 13, 2020 - 14:30 in Biology & Nature

By the time computational geneticist Pardis Sabeti finishes breakfast these days, she knows her inbox will be stuffed with notes, questions, and responses, all of which will require her immediate attention. There’s a thread on the diagnostic tests her lab at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard are developing for a range of diseases, now including COVID-19. Another scroll and there’s a back-and-forth she needs to weigh in on about the genetic sequence of the novel disease. There are also conversations on a project, eight years in the making, to help West and Central Africa detect disease threats as they emerge, a kind of pandemic early warning system that feels wildly prescient to the uninitiated. Then the meetings start. “I’m in meetings all day, every day from 7 a.m. till midnight, basically, and then working through the night,” said Sabeti, professor of organismic and evolutionary biology at the Faculty of Arts and...

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