Sabrina Gonzalez Pasterski Built a Plane Before Reimagining the Universe
Sabrina Gonzalez Pasterski built and flew her own aircraft as a teenager before becoming a leading theorist in celestial holography.
Sabrina Gonzalez Pasterski first tried to understand flight by building an airplane. She now studies whether the universe itself can be described in fewer dimensions.
14
Built her aircraft by
5.0
MIT GPA
Celestial holography
Research field
The airplane project
Pasterski began flying lessons at nine and spent years assembling and modifying a single-engine kit aircraft. Accounts sometimes compress the timeline to “built a plane at 12”; she began around that age and completed and flew it during her mid-teens.
The project demanded mechanical work, safety documentation and the confidence to test a machine she had helped construct.
From MIT to Harvard
At MIT she graduated at the top of the physics program with a perfect 5.0 GPA. She then completed a Harvard doctorate under Andrew Strominger, contributing to research on gravitational memory and the relationship between scattering physics and symmetries.
Mapping the universe’s boundary
At Perimeter Institute, Pasterski founded the Celestial Holography Initiative. The field asks whether gravitational events in our three-dimensional universe can be encoded by a lower-dimensional theory.
Why she stands out
The plane and the equations are connected by the same instinct: take a complex system apart, learn its rules and rebuild an understanding from first principles.
Sources: MIT Physics, Perimeter Institute
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