Smithsonian is running a profile of geneticist Pardis Sabeti, written by Seth Mnookin: "Pardis Sabeti, the Rollerblading Rock Star Scientist of Harvard".
It was a radical approach: Instead of using existing tools to analyze new data, she was trying to develop new tools to use on available data. When she was at Oxford, “Everybody thought what I was trying to look for was dumb,” Sabeti says. “It seemed as if I was just going to go nowhere. I know everyone has a hard time at some point when they’re in graduate school, but I was on the higher end of the hard time early on in my PhD.”
Sabeti's work identifying recent positive selection on genetic data served as an essential foundation to much later work, including our own work on the Holocene acceleration of these positively selected variants.
