Collaborators

Our Institutions

The Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard

The Sabeti Lab’s home is at the Broad Institute where Dr. Sabeti is an Institute Member of the Infectious Disease and Microbiome Program. Our team of computational and experimental geneticists and public health professionals all work together alongside members of the Broad’s scientific programs and platforms. We also collaborate with many great labs, including Alex Shalek, Paul Blainey, Feng Zhang, Deb Hung, and Nir Hacohen.

Harvard University

Dr. Sabeti is a tenured faculty member in the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University. She teaches Life Sciences 1b, a course on genetics, genomics, and evolution with around 400 undergraduates each year. She is deeply involved in student life, and the Sabeti Lab welcomes undergraduate researchers within the lab as well.

Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health

Dr. Sabeti is also tenured faculty in the Department of Immunology and Infectious Disease at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and we work closely with many of their offices in our international work. We have long standing collaborations on a number of projects with the Dyann Wirth Lab, as well as with those of Bill Hanage and Yonatan Grad.

Howard Hughes Medical Institute

Dr. Sabeti is an investigator of HHMI, and as such, we are grateful to them for the support that they give to the lab and projects. HHMI aims to advance scientific knowledge with the goal of making science more accessible and inclusive through nonprofit research funding and philanthropy.

Massachusetts General Hospital

Dr. Sabeti is also faculty at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), and the Sabeti Lab works closely with the lab of her former postdoc Jacob Lemieux, now faculty in the ID Division at MGH. They also work alongside Eric Rosenberg, Sarah Turbett, John Branda, and the larger MGH Micro Lab. We also collaborate with many other faculty including Shibani Mukerji, Regina Larocque, and Doug Kwon.

African Center for Genomics of Infectious Disease

Redeemer’s University

The Sabeti Lab has been working with Christian Happi and his team at Redeemer’s University, and together we launched the African Center for Genomics of Infectious Disease (ACEGID) in 2013. ACEGID, a partnership between institutions in Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Senegal, and the U.S., was designed to provide training and capacity building in Africa for the next generation of African genomic scientists, and it has gone on to train over 1300 researchers and healthcare professionals from 38 African countries. We recently launched Sentinel through TED’s Audacious Project to expand the capacity of West and Central Africa to rapidly detect, respond to, and develop countermeasures for poverty related endemic and epidemic diseases using applied genomic epidemiology, training, and mentorship.

Viral Hemorrhagic Fever Consortium

Scripps

Tulane

The Sabeti Lab has worked with Bob Garry at Tulane University, Christian Happi at ACEGID, and former postdoc, now faculty at Scripps Kristian Andersen since 2009, as well as other partners, such as Bob Tesh at The University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston, Texas, and Annie Rimoine at UCLA, in the Viral Hemorrhagic Fever Consortium (VHFC). Together, we study viral hemorrhagic fevers – Lassa fever first and foremost.

Fathom

Fathom Information Design is an award-winning studio in Boston focused on making complex data more understandable, accessible, and usable, and led by Dr. Ben Fry. The Sabeti Lab works closely with Fathom on the development of tools to understand microbial genomic and epidemiological data. Fathom is part of the Sentinel team. Furthermore, Fathom supports Operation Outbreak by building the dashboard used to simulate the viral outbreak data from the app.

Dimagi

Dimagi has worked with the Sabeti Lab and ACEGID over the last 5 years, developing a set of apps to collect laboratory and patient data in West Africa for front-line workers. Dimagi is part of the Sentinel team, and CommCare– an award-winning, open source mobile data collection and service delivery platform designed to improve data collection and the quality of frontline services in low-resource settings –is Dimagi’s flagship technology product. CommCare is used by 600,000 frontline workers who are tracking more than 400 million people around the world, and both Dimagi and CommCare are actively supporting COVID-19 response for contact tracing, surveillance, and basic self-reporting in the US and globally.

Massachusetts Consortium on Pathogen Readiness

HMS, UMassMed, BU

The Massachusetts Consortium on Pathogen Readiness (MassCPR) aims to prepare us for future pandemics by addressing challenges from the COVID-19 pandemic. The Sabeti Lab has worked with Jeremy Luban at UMassMed, Mike Springer at HMS, John Connor and Anna Honko at BU, and many labs in the Boston community on genomic epidemiology and functional characterization of pathogens to address these challenges.

Operation Outbreak

Inspire Project

In 2015, Dr. Sabeti became connected with Todd Brown at Sarasota Military Academy Prep. Together with Todd and her former postdoc Andres Colubri who is now faculty at UMassMed, as well as the Inspire Project, they launched Operation Outbreak (OO). OO is a STEM-focused educational platform grounded in an outbreak prevention and preparedness curriculum and a Bluetooth-based simulation, designed for inclusivity across educational and socioeconomic backgrounds. We created this tool in combination with a high school outbreak science curriculum to build outbreak preparedness and mitigation capacity in schools.

Massachusetts Department of Public Health

The Sabeti Lab works closely with the Massachusetts Department of Public Health (MDPH) to analyze and inform responses to outbreaks across the state. Our work has been guided by coupling public health needs with the continued advancements in genomics and related data science to address them, doing so during the Zika virus epidemic in 2015-2016, the unusually large mumps virus outbreaks in 2016-2017, and the recent SARS-CoV-2 outbreak. Together with MDPH and other public health partners, we have conducted routine surveillance, outbreak investigations, pandemic response, varying detection and tracking, characterization of population genetic diversity and evolutionary dynamics, microbiome and other metagenomic profiling of complex microbial communities, and clinical diagnostic detection.

Colorado Mesa University

COVIDCheck Colorado

Amidst COVID, the Sabeti Lab and Fathom became connected with COVIDCheck Colorado (CCC) and Colorado Mesa University (CMU) as they were launching programs for COVID response. We have worked closely with John Marshall and Amy Bronson at CMU, developing methods to do surveillance on college campuses.

Former Postdoc Labs

Princeton, Yale, JAX Lab

Dr. Sabeti also works closely with many of her former postdocs, including active collaborations with Kristian Andersen at Scripps and Andres Colubri at UMass Med (described above), Cameron Myhrvold at Princeton, Ryan Tewhey at the JAX Lab, and Steve Reilly at Yale. The Myhrvold Lab develops CRISPR-based technologies for studying viral and host RNA; the Tewhey Lab focuses on understanding the precise genetic architecture of complex traits and disease risk in humans; the Reilly Lab develops and applies novel technologies to better understand how genetic changes promote functional changes at the molecular, cellular, and phenotypic levels.

Irrua Specialist Teaching Hospital, Nigeria

The Irrua Specialist Teaching Hospital (ISTH) in Irrua, Nigeria consists of 140 physicians and ~16,000 annual patients, and it is located in rural Nigeria where Lassa is endemic with yearly outbreaks. The hospital has a commitment to research and has collaborated with researchers at the Bernhard-Nocht Institute (BNI) in Hamburg on one of the best recent epidemiological studies on Lassa.

Kenema Government Hospital, Sierra Leone

The Kenema Government Hospital (KGH) in Kenema, Eastern Province, Sierra Leone, is located in an area with the highest prevalence of Lassa Fever anywhere in the world. Lassa Fever and Ebola research in this region was re-established, and the biomedical infrastructure was expanded for this research to continue at KGH.