Sabrina Gonzalez Pasterski
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By: Holly Machado ‘25 Women In STEM: Issue 1.
he title of “The Next Albert Einstein” belongs to a firstgeneration, Cuban-American, native-Chicagoan scientist: Sabrina Gonzalez Pasterski.
Born June 3rd, 1993 to an encouraging engineering family, she built and flew her own single-engined airplane at just fourteen years old, thus founding Sabrina Aircraft Manufacturing (1). Years later, she became the first woman to graduate top of her class from the Massachusetts Insitute of Technology with a Bachelor’s in Physics. She went on to become a Harvard Physics Ph.D. candidate at 21 (2).
In 2014, Pasterski and her fellow Harvard colleagues discovered the Spin Memory Effect. This theory may assist in detecting, verifying, or identifying the effect of gravitational waves, both astrophysically and theoretically, on the past and future (3). This discovery revolutionized the way physicians and mathematicians alike viewed other gravitational and mechanical theories, as well as later discoveries. The discovery of this theory granted her complete academic freedom and allowed her to individually publish her findings in 2015. This publication would ultimately be cited by Stephen Hawking a year later. Additionally, she became the second-ever Ph.D. Harvard candidate to have her dissertation published in Physics Report, a well-renowned scholarly journal. In 2019, she earned her Ph.D. and completed a Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Princeton Centre for Theoretical Science after her graduation. HYPATIA JOURNAL
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