Dr. Shereen Sabet
Assistant Professor

Office Rm # 222
Research Lab Rm # 221

Phone Extension: 2140
Email: ssabet@lasierra.edu URL: http://faculty.lasierra.edu/~ssabet/index.html

Education

Dr. Sabet earned a B.S. degree in Biological Sciences from the University of California at Irvine (1992) and a Ph.D. in Microbiology & Immunology from the University of California at Los Angeles (2003).  She conducted her first post-doctoral training in Dr. Sunny Jiang’s laboratory in the Department of Environmental Health, Science, & Policy at UCI and was a National Science Foundation Minority Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Dr. Jesse G. Dillon’s laboratory at the California State University at Long Beach.  Dr. Sabet joined the Biology department at La Sierra University in 2009 as an Assistant Professor.

Current Duties

Dr. Sabet’s teaching assignments include Virology, General Biology II, Immunology, and Tools & Methods III.  She currently serves on the Department of Biology Research Grant and Scholarships committee and the Pre-Professional Recommendations committee, while mentoring several undergraduate student researchers.

Research Interests

Dr. Sabet is fascinated by halophages, a class of viruses that infect halophilic Bacteria and Archaea, which are microorganisms that thrive in extreme hypersaline aquatic habitats.  She is the only halophage researcher in the USA and one of a handful in the world.  Dr. Sabet is interested in better elucidating the host-virus dynamics of this class of extremophiles in order to better understand the ecology of halophages and how they can function under extreme hypersaline conditions.  Her research involves a multi-disciplinary approach that includes microbiology, molecular biology, and biochemistry.  Field sites include the solar salterns of Baja California (Mexico), San Diego, San Francisco, and the Great Salt Lake in Utah.

Honors, Memberships & Affiliations

Dr. Sabet is a member of the American Society of Limnology and Oceanography, the American Society for Microbiology, and the International Society for Extremophiles.