She studied in Brescia and Milan and earned her bachelor's and master's degrees in statistics and economics from Bocconi University in 1993, summa cum laude, working there with Eugenio Regazzini.
Her dissertation, Group Transformations and Dimensionality Reduction in Transition Rules for MCMC, was supervised by Jun S.
[2] After postdoctoral research at Stanford in the group of Neil Risch, Sabatti became an assistant professor of human genetics and statistics at the University of California, Los Angeles in 2000.
She returned to Stanford as an associate professor of health research and policy in 2009, changing to biomedical data science and statistics in 2015.
[3] Sabatti is married to Stanford statistician and data scientist Emmanuel Candès.