Sabrina Pasterski: Meet the world's next Einstein

“Physics itself is exciting enough. It’s not like a 9-to-5 thing. When you’re tired you sleep, and when you’re not, you do physics.” – Sabrina Pasterski

 

After graduating from the prestigious MIT, Sabrina Gonzalez Pasterski, 22, is pursuing a Ph.D. at Harvard and has uncountable job offers, including one from Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and NASA, and when attending a school where a large number of students are considered brilliant, she stands out as “the next Einstein.”

Initiation 

“I TOLD you, Daddy, I told you,” Sabrina Pasterski shouted excitedly before her father wrapped her up in an embrace. “Oh my God, it’s so amazing,” she said, then she broke into a short jig.

Sabrina, then aged just 13, had reason to celebrate. It was 2006 and the young Chicago native has just reached a milestone. While other barely teens are playing video games and sleeping in, Sabrina is laying the final touches on a single-engine aircraft she had built from scratch in a workshop in her father’s garage.

“It’s amazing, it just starts spinning. It’s awesome,” she said after the first test of the engine, one that took her 363 days to finish.

The plane was a sign of things to come. Fast-forward nine years and the now-22-year-old is being held up as a the “new Einstein”, a young woman whose brain works in ways few have ever worked and whose future is limitless.

If you haven’t heard of her, you’re not alone. But the world will soon know her name. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) graduate is next in line — behind Stephen Hawking and Albert Einstein — to take the mantle as the world’s most talented thinker.

Sabrina Pasterski(2nd from right) Distinguished Achievement in Entrepreneurship

Unlike many other young people her age, the Chicago native is not a fan of social media and has no Facebook, LinkedIn or Instagram accounts. She doesn’t even own a smartphone. However, Pasterski does regularly update her website, PhysicsGirl, with her list of achievements and proficiencies.

 
Shockingly, Pasterski was waitlisted to MIT when she first applied. That was before MIT Professors Allen Haggerty and Earll Murman were shown a video of Pasterski building her airplane. Haggerty told Yahoo:

“Our mouths were hanging open after we looked at it. Her potential is off the charts.”

She was later accepted and graduated with a grade point average of 5.00, the school’s highest possible score. Her adviser, Harvard professor Andrew Strominger, who is publishing a paper with famed physicist Stephen Hawking, has high words of praise for Pasterski. She has also been granted thousands of dollars from Hertz Foundation, the Smith Foundation and the National Science Foundation to support her studies and work.

Pasterski studies black-holes, the nature of gravity and space-time, with emphasis on the understanding of quantum gravity that seeks to explain the phenomenon of gravity in the context of quantum mechanics – which means her findings could dramatically change our understanding of how the universe works.

The ‘new Einstein’ stands out among the increasing number of young physicists in the United States  – which increased from 3,178 in 1999 to 7,329 in 2013, according to the Institute of Physics of the United States and has received hundreds of thousands of dollars from various organizations and companies to finance her research.

She regularly features in Forbes’ 30 under 30 list and she graduated from one of the world’s most prestigious schools with the highest score possible.