Sabrina Gonzalez Pasterski, a bright mind in modern physics, started her journey long before she entered a university classroom. At just 12, she started building a single-engine aircraft from a kit. By 14, she was flying it solo, even years before she was legally old enough to drive, according to a report in Times of India.
The Chicago-born physicist has since achieved significant milestones that few scientists can match. She graduated from MIT with a perfect 5.0 GPA, completed her PhD at Harvard, saw her research cited by the late Stephen Hawking.
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As if this was not enough, she even turned down offers from NASA, Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin, and even a reported $1.1 million academic position to pursue one of science's biggest unanswered questions. Now leading cutting-edge research into quantum gravity and spacetime, the 1993-born physicist is being called as 'Next Albert Einstein'.
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From building a plane at 12 to flying it at 14
Born in Chicago to a Cuban-American mother and a Polish-American father, Sabrina Gonzalez Pasterski developed an unusual fascination with aviation at an early age.
At just 12 years old, she began gathering a Zenith CH 601 XL single-engine aircraft from a kit. The project took nearly two years to complete, with Pasterski doing much of the work herself.
By the age of 14, she was already flying the plane all alone — years before she was legally old enough to get behind the wheel of a car.
Her passion for science continued during her time at the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy, where she became a semifinalist for the US team at the International Physics Olympiad. She also interned at NASA's Kennedy Space Center and Blue Origin long before either organisation would later try to recruit her.
The homemade aircraft that helped her get into MIT
When Pasterski applied to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 2010, she was first asked to wait. But things took a U-turn after admissions officials saw the aircraft she had built and documented herself.
Once admitted, she scripted history. Pasterski completed her physics degree in just three years, graduating in 2014 with a perfect 5.0 GPA. She became the first woman in around two decades to finish first in MIT's physics department and also became the first woman to receive the prestigious Orloff Scholarship.
Harvard, Stephen Hawking and the 'spin memory effect'
After MIT, Pasterski joined Harvard University for a PhD under renowned theoretical physicist Andrew Strominger.
There, alongside Strominger and physicist Alexander Zhiboedov, she helped discover the spin memory effect, an important concept in gravitational-wave physics that explores how information can be encoded in spacetime.
The breakthrough attracted attention across the scientific community. Among those who cited her work was legendary physicist Stephen Hawking, who referenced her research in some of his final scientific papers before his death.
Why she turned down NASA, Jeff Bezos and a $1.1 million academic offer
NASA reportedly approached her with a job offer. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos also wanted her to join Blue Origin, his private space company.
Brown University is widely reported to have offered her an assistant professorship worth about $1.1 million, an extraordinary package for someone so early in her academic career.
Pasterski declined every one of them.
Instead, in 2021, she joined the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Canada, becoming one of its youngest research faculty members at just 27 years old.
For Pasterski, the opportunity to pursue fundamental scientific questions mattered more than salary or prestige.
Working on one of physics' biggest unanswered questions
At the Perimeter Institute, Pasterski founded the Celestial Holography Initiative, a major research programme exploring one of the most ambitious ideas in modern physics.
The project aims to better understand the relationship between quantum mechanics and gravity — a problem that has challenged physicists for decades.
Its research examines whether information describing our three-dimensional universe could be encoded on a lower-dimensional boundary, an idea often referred to as the holographic principle.
In 2023, the initiative received an $8 million grant from the Simons Foundation, bringing together leading researchers from institutions including Harvard, Oxford, Cambridge and the Institute for Advanced Study.
Why many people call her the 'next Einstein'
Comparisons between Pasterski and Albert Einstein have appeared repeatedly in media coverage over the years.
The comparison is not because she has already solved Einstein's equations, but because she is tackling one of the deepest questions left unanswered after Einstein's work — how gravity behaves at the quantum level.
In an interview with Discovery Canada, she said: "I don't know exactly what problem I will or will not end up solving, or what exactly I'll end up working on in a couple of years."
She added: "The fun thing about physics is that you don't know exactly what you're going to do. And normally things just change very quickly, kind of irreversibly, if they're really right."
(With TOI inputs)
