Iranian evolutionary geneticist_Pardis C. Sabeti.

Pardis C. Sabeti (born December 25, 1975 in Tehran) she is an Iranian American evolutionary geneticist, who developed a statistical method which identifies sections of the genome that have been subject to natural selection. Sabeti is an Assistant Professor in the Center for Systems Biology and Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University. Sabeti studied at MIT and at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, and earned a medical degree from Harvard Medical School. She has received a Burroughs Wellcome Fund Career Award in the Biomedical Sciences. As a postdoctoral fellow with Eric Lander at the Broad Institute, Sabeti modified a family of previously developed statistical tests for positive selection that look for common genetic variants found on unusually long haplotypes. Her test, known as the cross population extended haplotype homozygosity test, or XP-EHH, was designed to detect advantageous mutations whose frequency in human populations has risen rapidly over the last 10000 years. The XP-EHH test, in combination with existing methods, recovered several known targets of recent natural selection, and suggested several novel targets. She also identified two variants in the genes LARGE and DMD, known to be involved in infection by Lassa fever, that show strong signals of natural selection in West Africans Sabeti is also the lead singer and bass player of the rock band Thousand Days