But then when my research started going well and I started publishing, they'd be like, Wow!

And she's in a band.

1235 I don't know.

Yeah, don't tell me People think it to be one dimensional to be a scientist, But actually your science gets better when you stimulate your creativity, your curiosity, all of that.

So to me, actually doing music helps me be a better scientist.

I'm pretty Sveti.

I'm a geneticist and I'm a National Geographic emerging explorer.

I use math Thio, dissect the genomes of viruses to decode them and understand how they evolve, how they spread and ultimately, how toe prevent infectious disease and prevent outbreaks.

So, yeah, I was born in Tehran, Iran.

I came here when I was a little girl and the middle school me was just a little girl who loved math s o much.

I just loved the logic and the puzzles and Justus.

Soon as I kind of really got into it, I never stopped.

Math is a It's a powerful tool Thio mind vast amounts of data and genomics is just thousands millions.

Billions of letters that you're trying to decode decipher, um, using math, using computers.

So that's what I dio.

That's what I love.

So viruses, a microscopic thing that can infect us and can cause a lot of harm can make us very sick on guy.

Study all sorts of viruses from the common flu to Ebola.

Ebola is, ah, very deadly virus.

It can have really high mortality rates, and it can spread really quickly.

In kind of these worst case outbreaks, it could be 80% which is why we're really worried about it.

On Outbreak is an infectious disease that's got out of control.

I think of it like a wildfire, and you never really know where one will start, but you need to detect it, and you need to contain it before it gets out of control.

That's what my work does for infectious disease for outbreaks during the 2014 outbreak of Ebola in West Africa, way essentially, when patients infected their blood samples taken for diagnosis were ableto take that sample, deactivate the virus within it and ship it to the United States, where we were able to prepare them and put them on sequencing machines and read out their genomes.

So once we sequence of viruses, you know it might look something like this.

This is actually Ebola's genome sequence, and there's clues in here, and we can use math and computation that start to decipher those clues.

Learn about the viruses history on how it's changing.

All of this is arming us towards better detection surveillance prevention.

Really, To be able to put out that wildfire is somebody who studies infectious diseases were most successful.

Nothing happens, right?

We were trying to stop outbreaks from ever occurring, and so were most successful at that point when we put out the sparks and you never hear about it, Um, but that's sort of that's an exciting challenge.

So, you know, one of the tools that we've created is an outbreak simulation that spread over Bluetooth from phone to phone for middle schoolers to get to experience what an outbreak might be like, but before a realized event.

So, you know, we created this tool to be able to educate and have outreach to students, but really, we learned as much from them as anything else.

You know, their participation taught us about how people respond to outbreaks and like their ingenuity, their thought process during the outbreak taught us so much.

I love working in outbreaks because it requires cooperation.

It requires people working together collaborating.

And that's how you win on bit's sort of the way.

I like to think about the world.

I'm in a band.

I'm not.

I'm not a singer songwriter.

I like being part of a collective.

It's where the best things come together, every all right, there you go, mhm.