Sabrina Gonzalez Pasterski is a first-generation Cuban-American theoretical physicist from Chicago whose life has been shaped by flight and physics.
She began flight lessons at age nine and, between ages 12 and 14, built a single-engine Zenith CH 601 XL aircraft from a kit, making her own engineering modifications after fatal midair breakups involving the model.
At 16, before she had a driver’s license, she flew the aircraft solo.
The FAA later allowed her demonstration flight to validate her modifications before grounding the fleet.
At MIT, Pasterski became the first freshman selected for NASA’s January Operational Internship, received the inaugural MIT Freshman Entrepreneurship Award, interned at NASA Kennedy Space Center and CERN, and graduated first in her MIT Physics class.
She earned her PhD from Harvard in 2019 under Andrew Strominger, focusing on quantum gravity, then joined Canada’s Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics at 27 as its youngest faculty member and one of only three women on staff at the time.
She now leads the Celestial Holography Initiative, and her honors include Scientific American’s 30 Under 30, Forbes 30 Under 30 in Science, and the Albert Einstein Foundation’s “100 Greatest Innovators.”
Chapters
00:00 Meet Sabrina Pasterski
14:52 From Aviation to Physics
31:01 NASA, Blue Origin, and CERN
44:09 String Theory and Modern Physics
57:02 Funding Science and Industry
1:10:08 Gravitational Memory Explained
1:23:01 Cosmology and Black Hole Mysteries
1:36:20 Celestial Holography
1:50:52 Death, Consciousness, and Physics
2:01:14 Life at the Perimeter Institute
2:13:16 The Future of Physics and Global Competition
2:25:38 Final Thoughts and Wrap Up
