The Happy Professor

Harvard’s state-of-the-art Northwest Science Building is found at 52 Oxford Street in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a ten-minute walk from the tourists packing the university’s famed central yard. It’s part of a complex of hulking brick-and-glass laboratories that form the new heart of Harvard’s fabled research engine. Inside, the Northwest looks like a Hollywood vision of a science lab. The hallways defining the perimeter of each floor are polished concrete and lit dimly in the style of television crime procedurals.

Inside the hallways, in the center of the building, are the wetlabs, with graduate students manipulating pipettes visible through windowed steel doors. On the other side of the hallway are the professors’ offices, defined by floor-to-ceiling glass partitions. It was one of these offices in particular that drew me to the Northwest on a sunny June afternoon—the office of Pardis Sabeti, a thirty-five-year-old professor of evolutionary biology who had mastered one of the more elusive but powerful strategies in the quest for work you love.

One of the first things you’ll notice if you spend time around Pardis is that she enjoys her life. Biology, like any high-stakes academic field, is demanding. Because of this it has a reputation for turning young professors into curmudgeons who adopt a masochistic brand of workaholism, in which relaxation becomes a sign of failure and the accomplishments of peers become tragedies. This can be a bleak existence. Pardis, for her part, has avoided this fate.

Not five minutes into my visit, for example, a young grad student, one of ten people Pardis employs in her eponymous Sabeti Lab, pokes his head into the office.

“We’re heading down to volleyball practice,” he says, referencing the lab’s team, which evidently takes itself seriously. She promises to join them as soon as our interview ends.

Volleyball is not Pardis’s only hobby. In a corner of her office she keeps an acoustic guitar that serves as more than decoration: Pardis plays in a band called Thousand Days, which is well known in Boston music circles. In 2008, PBS featured the band in a Nova special called Researchers Who Rock.

Pardis’s energy for these activities is a side effect of her enthusiasm for her work. The bulk of her research focuses on Africa, with studies ongoing in Senegal, Sierra Leone, and most of all, Nigeria. To Pardis, this work is about more than just the accumulation of publications and grant money. At one point in our conversation, for example, she pulls out her laptop: “You have to see this video of me and my girls,” she says, loading up a YouTube clip of Pardis, guitar in hand, leading a group of four African women in a song. The video was shot outdoors in Nigeria. Palm trees provide the backdrop. The women, I learn, work in a clinic supported by the Sabeti Lab. “These women deal with people who die in devastating ways every day,” she says to no one in particular while the video plays. On screen, everyone is smiling while Pardis leads them, with mixed success, through the verses. “I love going there,” she adds. “Nigeria is my African home.”

It’s clear that Pardis has avoided the grinding cynicism that traps so many young academics, and has instead built an engaging life (“It’s not always easy,” she once said in an interview, “but I truly love what I do”¹). But how did she pull off this feat? As I spent time with Pardis, I recognized that her happiness comes from the fact that she built her career on a clear and compelling mission—something that not only gives meaning to her work but provides the energy needed to embrace life beyond the lab. In the overachieving style typical of Harvard, Pardis’s mission is by no means subtle: Her goal, put simply, is to rid the world of its most ancient and deadly diseases.