Sceleb | Pardis Sabeti

Pardis Sabeti is an American computational geneticist. Born in Tehran, Sabeti's family moved to the US from Iran when she was four years old.

Sabeti completed a BS in biology at MIT where she was also class president and a member of the varsity tennis team. She was Rhodes Scholar at Oxford and received a doctorate in evolutionary genetics in 2002. In 2006, Sabeti completed a MD, summa cum laude, at Harvard Medical School. Sabeti is now an associate professor Harvard University in the Center for Systems Biology and Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology. She also holds positions at the Harvard School of Public Health the Broad Institute.

Sabeti's awards include a Burroughs Wellcome Fund Career Award in the Biomedical Sciences, a Packard Foundation award in Science and Engineering, and an NIH Innovator Award. She also received awards from NIAID, TMTI, and the Gates Foundation and is a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader, a PopTech Science Fellow, and a National Geographic Emerging Explorer.

Firmly in the 'rockstar scientist' category, Sabeti is also the lead singer and writer for the alternative rock band Thousand Days.

Sabeti also debuted on our Stylish Scientist List in 2013.

Marine Biologist | Ayana Elizabeth

Ayana Elizabeth is an American marine biologist. Elizabeth grew up in Brooklyn, NY and in her bio she proudly shares that she is the daughter of "a former teacher/current egg farmer and a former architect/current potter."

Elizabeth received her BA in Environmental Studies from Harvard in 2002 and her PhD in Marine Biology from the UCSD Scripps Institution of Oceanography in 2011. Elizabeth's list of fellowship is lengthy: NSF Graduate Research Fellowship, NSF IGERT Fellowship, UCSD Diversity Fellowship, Switzer Environmental Fellowship, AAUW American Fellowship, and Knauss Sea Grant Fellowship. She is also the recipient of multiple grants and awards including the Rare/National Geographic Solution Search and was named a “World Changer” on Dell’s #Inspire 100 List. She is currently Executive Director of the Waitt Institute and a blogger for National Geographic.

Elizabeth's passion is sustainable fisheres, but when she's not collecting, creating, actualizing, and amplifying the best ideas in ocean conservation - or scuba diving (for work and for pleasure) - she is also a jazz singer and a keen investigator of dance parties.

Elizabeth has been on our Future-ish Stylish Scientist List two years in a row.

>> Blog: National Geographic Ocean Views
>> Twitter: @ayanaeliza

Culturomics of Science, Design, and Culture

Apparently you can teach old dogs new tricks. The humanities just got a fancy new method of conducting historical analysis of documents by observing the frequency of words in archived documents using Google Books, culturomics. Leading the charge is mathematician Jean-Baptiste Michel in Harvard's Program for Evolutionary Dynamics. Michel and several co-authors recently published Quantitative Analysis of Culture Using Millions of Digitized Books in the January 14, 2011 issue of Science Magazine. Since making the front page of the New York Times, the arts & sciences have been in a tizzy thinking about all the new research opportunities. One project that used the tool was The Science Hall of Fame created and curated by Adrian Veres and John Bohannon on the AAAS website, Science, that lists the frequency of scientists in the digital book database using 'milliDarwins' as they comparable unit of measurement.

We ran our own little word search using Google Labs Book Ngram Viewer and came up with the above graph indicating the frequency of 'science, design, and culture' in the digital database. According to this graph, we were quite enlightened at the turn of the millennium but not so much after the big event. Try it out, let the kids take it for a spin, and see how your favorite people and words have fared in the written word over the last 200 years or so.

Design Idol - Landscape Architect Kongjian Yu

Internationally acclaimed landscape architect Dr. Kongjian Yu continues to set new standards for his industry by infusing his agrarian roots and culture into his breathtaking projects that combine the best of sustainable design with cutting-edge engineering. Yu's projects with his firm, Turenscape, range from small gardens to regional planning but they all include aspects of nature, man, and spirits as one. The Qinhuangdao Red Ribbon Park (pictured above) is just one such example which created a modern urban recreation opportunity while maintaining the ecological system that existed there prior to the project. Dr. Yu now teaches at Peking University and Harvard so we expect to see many more inspiring works from Dr. Yu, as well as his students for many generations to come.