Pardis Sabeti

Especially working in infectious disease, it's very interesting because these infectious diseases, these agents, they evolve over time. So it's very much an arms race and understanding how each changes to protect itself and to continue. And so it's very much this puzzle-solving but with this great urgency and importance in what you find.

At 9, I think I had really gotten into tennis. I liked writing short stories; I loved solving math problems. I was learning a little piano, and I was collecting Garbage Pail Kids cards.

The process of discovery in my field is very incremental. But there are moments when you realize you know something about the world nobody else knows. That's extraordinarily exhilarating.

You get these moments of thrill. There you are, at 3:00 in the morning, and you know something about how we evolved that nobody else in the world knows. It's a thrill of discovery. You make this breakthrough, and you find something. It's this wonderful, wonderful scavenger hunt when you got to the end. It's just so great to be a scientist.

The great thing about America is I've never felt like an outsider. I'm just a different piece of the puzzle.

I don't really love to perform in music. Some people like it more, but it's not my thing so much, but just the writing, when you get the lyric, and the lyric just goes just the right way, or you find the right bridge that takes you to the solo, and those moments are tremendous, and it's difficult to portray.

I like - I love calculus. I love linear algebra, probability and statistics, that kind of stuff. I just really like that.

As long as I have a heartbeat, I'm fine. So I just do what I love, and I do it the best that I can. And if it all goes away, I'll just start over.

My kind of, like, life goal is to help train students to be good people as well as good scientists. That would be my dream.

I sometimes try to think of my life as an Iranian, and it is hard to imagine. I am grateful for the life I have had in America and all the amazing opportunities and experiences it has given me. But there is a spirit in Iranians I can see that is unbounded by geography.

So much of the physical world has been explored. But the deluge of data I get to investigate really lets me chart new territory. Genetic data from people living today forms an archaeological record of what happened to their ancestors 10,000 years ago.

Over the years, we settled into American life and embraced it fully. But having come from a different culture, I didn't know the boundaries of American culture. Which is that, as a girl, you didn't play football or soccer at lunch with the boys, and to be cool, you didn't get into math Olympiad.