Alt science
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After a day of computer programming and poring over genetic data, Pardis Sabeti relaxes her brain by writing rock songs.
Born in Tehran, Sabeti is a computational biologist at Harvard and the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT. She studies human evolution — past, current and future. Her cutting-edge work on the adaptations of humans and the microbes that infect them placed her among the World Economic Forum’s Young Global Leaders for 2012. And when she’s not in the lab, she’s the lead singer of an alternative rock band in Boston called Thousand Days.
“When my brain is most active in science, I’m also most musically creative,” she says. It’s not that either music or science fuels the other, she explains, but rather that at times her brain enters a creative mode where both just flow.