Meet the Cuban-American physicist who built a plane at 12, rejected a $1.1M offer and is trying to prove the universe is a hologram

By Phan Anh   March 17, 2026 | 06:06 am GMT+7

Theoretical physicist Sabrina Gonzalez Pasterski. Photo courtesy of Perimeter Institute

Theoretical physicist Sabrina Gonzalez Pasterski, who built and flew her own airplane before she had a driver's license, is leading a multimillion-dollar effort to answer one of science's biggest questions: whether our entire universe can be described as a hologram.

The 32-year-old Cuban-American genius's journey into physics began at age nine, when she took her first flight in a small plane along Chicago's lakefront. As she told the Chicago Tribune in a 2015 interview, the experience gave her a different perspective on everything.

By 10, she had rebuilt an airplane engine at her family's home. At 12, according to a contemporaneous report in Midwest Flyer, she began constructing a single-engine Zenith CH 601 XL aircraft from a kit in her father's garage. She earned FAA airworthiness certification and completed her first U.S. solo flight at 16, documenting the project in a YouTube video that has since been viewed hundreds of thousands of times.

The feat helped land her at MIT, where she became the first woman to win the physics department's Orloff Scholarship, according to her website physicsgirl.com. She graduated in 2013 with a perfect 5.00 GPA, tying for the highest in the entire institute.

At Harvard, working under renowned physicist Andrew Strominger, she co-discovered what is known as the spin memory effect, a phenomenon in which gravitational waves leave a permanent imprint on the fabric of spacetime. The finding completed a theoretical framework now named partly after her: the Pasterski-Strominger-Zhiboedov Triangle. In 2016, Stephen Hawking cited her research in his own papers on black holes, as reported by Inc. magazine.

Her Harvard dissertation was published in Physics Reports, making her only the second PhD candidate from the university to achieve that distinction, according to the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy’s alumni page. The first won a Nobel Prize.

After postdoctoral work at Princeton, Pasterski fielded offers from NASA, Blue Origin and Brown University, which put forward an unsolicited $1.1 million assistant professorship, as multiple outlets including Forbes have reported. She turned them all down.

Instead, in 2021, she joined the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Canada, becoming its youngest faculty member at 27, according to the institute's own profile. There she founded the Celestial Holography Initiative, a research program exploring the radical idea that our four-dimensional universe might be fully described by a two-dimensional theory mapped onto the night sky.

The concept targets the deepest unsolved problem in physics: unifying Einstein's general relativity with quantum mechanics.

In 2023, the Simons Foundation backed the effort with an $8 million grant, assembling a team of 13 principal investigators from Harvard, Oxford, Cambridge and the Institute for Advanced Study, among others, according to the foundation's website. Pasterski serves as deputy director.

Her spin memory effect may soon get an observational test. According to Perimeter Institute, next-generation gravitational wave detectors could detect the phenomenon. China is also reportedly preparing satellite missions based on a 2014 proposal Pasterski authored for detecting gravitational waves from space, as noted on the IMSA alumni page.

Along the way, Pasterski has become a prominent advocate for girls in STEM. Through the Let Girls Learn initiative launched by the Obama administration, she was invited to the White House in 2016, as reported by PBS. Her outreach work has been recognized by the Annenberg Foundation and the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, according to the Helena Foundation’s member profile.

Despite her numerous accolades, including being named among Forbes 30 Under 30, Scientific American 30 Under 30 and the Albert Einstein Foundation’s 2018 Genius 100 Visions Project, Pasterski keeps a deliberately low profile. She has no social media accounts and reportedly no smartphone, as OZY noted in a widely shared 2016 profile. Her website is a no-frills record of her research and a fact-check sheet correcting media inaccuracies.

While there were Internet reports saying Harvard called her "the next Einstein," the claim actually had no basis, according to fact-checking website Snopes.

Pasterski herself once wrote on her website: "I am just a grad student. I have so much to learn."