Meet Sabrina Gonzalez Pasterski, The 23 Year Old Hailed As The Next Einstein

Cuban-American Sabrina Gonzalez Pasterski is a Harvard PhD candidate in Physics who is being hailed as “the next Einstein” by her Harvard mentors and counts Stephen Hawking as a fan of her work. At just 23-years old, NASA, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and Aerospace giant Blue Origin, among others, are eager to recruit her.

She took flying lessons from the age of 9, built a single-engine airplane at 14 and became the youngest person in history, at age 16, to build and fly her own plane. In the same year she was admitted to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where in 2013 she was the first woman to graduate top of her undergraduate class in Physics there for 20 years. She did it in her teens, in just three years.

A post shared by Sabrina Gonzalez Pasterski (@sabrinagonzalezpasterski) on Mar 12, 2017 at 9:55am PDT

Paterski is a scientist working on string theory and high energy physics, researching space, time, the nature of gravity and black holes. Stephen Hawking has cited her work, and like his own work, and the work of Albert Einstein, discoveries in these areas help understand the workings of the universe.

Paterksi was awarded a Young Women’s Honors Award from Marie Claire back in February and told Marie Claire, ?When I was little, I wanted to design spacecraft. Be optimistic about what you believe you can do. When you’re little, you say a lot of things about what you’ll do or be when you’re older – I think it’s important not to lose sight of those dreams.?

A post shared by Sabrina Gonzalez Pasterski (@sabrinagonzalezpasterski) on Mar 4, 2017 at 5:18am PST

A lack of women in STEM careers is an ongoing concern, with the The Central Statistics Office estimating that less than 25 per cent of the approximately 120,000 people working in STEM-related jobs in Ireland  are female. Find out more about Sabrina Gonzalez Pasterski at physicsgirl.com.

Featured Image: @votolatino.