 My name is Pardis Sabeti. I am an assistant professor of Harvard University and the Broad Institute. I work in genetics and infectious disease, and in particular, I use genomic technology to study diseases like malaria, Lassa fever, Ebola, and cholera. These are devastating diseases of humanity that are affecting many people today. I do much of my work in West Africa and Nigeria and Sierra Leone, and I'm very passionate about that work. And also another time I'm in a rock band called Thousand Days as a lead singer and writer for that band. The next generation of leaders, I would say they'd be in part defined by fearlessness to ask broad, ambitious, multidisciplinary questions of themselves and of the world. I mean, the world is getting increasingly complex with more and more data, more and more diversity. While specialization, I think, is always important, it's now not OK to just specialize. You have to be able to work in an interdisciplinary environment and have depth and breadth. As a university professor, I have the opportunity to get to see the next generation of leaders amongst my students and in my lab. And as an example, just in my own lab, I have physicists, mathematicians, computer scientists, anthropologists, biologists, all working together to answer these questions, each bringing in their own background and depth, but also having that breadth to communicate across a context to answer questions. I almost call it the sort of Renaissance man, which is obviously something that has a precedent. It's been an idea that's been around for a long time, but perhaps our generation is rediscovering it. The greatest opportunities and challenges of our generation would probably be power. In our generation, we have the more potential for individuals to affect change to our planet than ever before. We've got more data to understand patterns about our world. We have more tools to affect change in our world. And so we can make tremendous positive impact on the world around us. But we have to make sure that we do that, that we get through this technological age in a way where we affect positive change, not negative. What do I hope to gain from the young global readers community? I would say perspective. I hope to gain perspective. And I hope to give perspective. I think my own heuristic for growth is to seek out alternative perspectives from my own to help me sort of develop my thinking. And so often we get our perspective from those around us, from our sort of talking and bantering with our family, our friends, our colleagues, those around us. And while that's extraordinarily important, there's only a certain number of perspectives that you'll get. I guess in my area, in my field, we'd say that our algorithm is only going to find a local optimum. But if we can increase the search space, if we can look at people from more diverse backgrounds from different countries, continents, different fields, we can get a much richer perspective. And I think that the young global leaders community is exactly that for me, because there are people from so many different continents, so many different places in life, so many different approaches. The one thing that we all have in common, though, is this deep desire and passion to affect positive change in the world around us. And I think it couldn't be a better community in order to broaden my horizons to gain new perspective. And so in that way, I'm really excited to become part of this community and look forward to seeing what's all the possibilities.