07/11/2026
She built and flew her own airplane before she had a driver's license.
Sabrina Gonzalez Pasterski was born in Chicago in 1993 to a Cuban-American family. At 14, she started building a single-engine aircraft from a kit in her father's garage. She earned FAA certification and flew it herself before she was old enough to drive a car.
MIT waitlisted her. She got in anyway, graduated top of her physics class, and went on to Harvard for her PhD. There, working under physicist Andrew Strominger, she helped discover something called the spin memory effect, a subtle signature in how gravitational waves carry information. When she published the findings, Stephen Hawking cited her work.
She reportedly turned down offers from NASA and Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin, along with a reported million-dollar professorship from Brown University. Instead, in 2021, she joined the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ontario, becoming one of its youngest faculty members ever.
Today she leads the Celestial Holography Initiative, a research program chasing one of the strangest ideas in physics: that our entire three-dimensional universe might be fully described by information encoded on a two-dimensional surface, like a hologram. If the theory holds up, it could be a real step toward uniting quantum mechanics and gravity, a problem that stumped Einstein for the last decades of his life.
Harvard has called her "the next Einstein." Pasterski herself has pushed back on the label, saying the hype puts unfair pressure on the actual science.
