Pardis Sabeti has had an obsession with math and logic from a young age. When she was little, her mother set up a makeshift classroom in their home where Sabeti's older sister, Parisa, taught her everything she learned in school. By the time she started school herself, Sabeti already had all of her math facts memorized, so she simply worked on answering faster than everyone else. "I already had the information," she told The Smithsonian, "so it just got me to focus on excellence."

Her math proficiency led to a defining moment in 7th grade math class, one that foreshadowed her bright academic future. "The teacher came in with a VHS tape of a video of an MIT 2.007 (then 2.70) competition," she told Welcometoterranova. "It's a wild event where mechanical engineers build robots for head-to-head competition with other robots. I saw this and thought, 'What is this magical place?' It was my Charlie and the Chocolate Factory moment. That's when MIT came into my consciousness."

After earning a National Merit Scholarship, Sabeti went on to MIT and earned a B.S. in biology with a perfect 5.0 GPA. (She was also class president and played on the varsity tennis team.) She won a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford, where she earned a Masters and Doctorate in the field of evolutionary genetics. In 2006, she became the third woman to graduate summa cum laude from Harvard Medical School.