Sabrina Pasterski
"The Holy Grail is...trying to understand a theory of quantum gravity."
Tipped as the next Einstein, Sabrina Gonzalez Pasterski is a pioneering theoretical physicist reshaping our understanding of space, time, and gravity. A first-generation Cuban-American from Chicago, she built and flew her own plane solo at 14, graduated from MIT with a perfect 5.0 GPA, and earned her PhD from Harvard, where her early work on the spin memory effect was later cited by Stephen Hawking. She has received job offers from NASA and Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin, and was named to Forbes' 30 Under 30 list twice.
Now a faculty member at the Perimeter Institute and founder and principal investigator of the Celestiail Holography Initiative, Pasterski leads efforts to encode the universe as a hologram, a bold step toward uniting quantum theory with general relativity.
"Her potential is off the charts." — Allen Haggerty, MIT