[3][4] Sabeti and her lab have pioneered technologies for detecting, tracking, and countering deadly pathogens, including Ebola,[5][6] Zika,[7] Lassa,[8][9] and SARS-CoV-2.

[10][11]  They have also created some of the most powerful algorithms and molecular tools to characterize the human genome and methods for gene delivery of new biomedicines to specific tissues.

[17][18] She is the current host of the educational series Against All Odds: Inside Statistics sponsored by Annenberg Learner and a Crash Course on Outbreak Science[19][20] and is the lead singer and a writer for the rock band Thousand Days.

[32] Sabeti attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where she was a member of the varsity tennis team and class president, graduating in 1997 with a major in biology and a "perfect 5.0 average.

"[26] At MIT, she began her research career in David Bartel's laboratory[33] and was advised by Eric Lander,[34] and was a teaching assistant for undergraduate courses in genetics and biochemistry.

Sabeti was selected as Rhodes Scholar and completed a masters in human biology than doctorate work in evolutionary genetics in 2002,[1] at New College, Oxford, earning a M.Sc.

[37][38][39][40][41][42][21] As a faculty member at Harvard, Sabeti and her group have developed a statistical test to pinpoint signals of selection, the Composite of Multiple Signals (CMS),[43] In 2014, having worked for a decade together in West Africa on Lassa fever and other infectious diseases, Sabeti and Christian Happi, a Cameroonian-Nigerian geneticist, and their teams launched the African Center of Excellence for Genomics of Infectious Disease (ACEGID) to enhance pathogen surveillance and education in Africa.

Sabeti's team continued to support outbreak response, developing and deploying genomic and computational tools to elucidate the origins, evolution, and community transmission of viruses.

In 2019, Sabeti and Happi's teams were awarded funding from the TED Audacious Project to build Sentinel, a pandemic pre-emption and response system.

"[48][49] Her lab developed a family of statistical tests to detect and characterize correlations in datasets of any kind, maximal information non-parametric exploration (MINE).

[50] In February 2021 Sabeti co-authored a paper on how a certain level of COVID-19 anti-bodies may provide lasting protection against the virus, studying 4300 employees of SpaceX with its CEO Elon Musk.

[54] Sabeti is an annual participant in the Distinguished Lecture Series at the acclaimed Research Science Institute at MIT for high school students.