Name Sabrina Pasterski Citizenship U.S. Education Ph.D. Candidate | Occupation Physicist Nationality Polish-Cuban-American | |
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Known for "Spin Memory" and "the Triangle" Residence Edison Park, Illinois, United States Parents Mark Floyd Pasterski, Maria Gonzalez Similar | ||
Is this 22 year old woman the next einstein
Sabrina Gonzalez Pasterski (born June 3, 1993) is an American physicist from Chicago, Illinois who studies string theory and high energy physics. She describes herself as "a proud first-generation Cuban-American & Chicago Public Schools alumna." She completed her undergraduate studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and is currently a graduate student at Harvard University.
Contents
- Is this 22 year old woman the next einstein
- Early life and education
- Academia
- Awards and honors
- Media coverage
- References
Pasterski has made contributions in the field of gravitational memories. She is best known for her concept of "the Triangle," which connects several physical ideas.
Early life and education
Gonzalez was born in Chicago on June 3, 1993. She enrolled at the Edison Regional Gifted Center in 1998, and graduated from the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy in 2010.
Gonzalez holds an active interest in aviation. She took her first flying lesson in 2003, co-piloted FAA1 at EAA AirVenture Oshkosh in 2005 and started building a kit aircraft by 2006. She soloed her Cessna 150 in Canada in 2007 and certified the aircraft she had built from a kit as airworthy in 2008, with MIT's assistance. Her first U.S. solo flight was in that kit aircraft in 2009 after being signed off by her CFI Jay Maynard.
Gonzalez' scientific heroes include Leon Lederman, Dudley Herschbach, and Freeman Dyson, and she was drawn to physics by Jeff Bezos. She has received job offers from Blue Origin, an aerospace company founded by Amazon.com's Jeff Bezos, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).
Academia
Before focusing on high energy theory, Gonzalez Pasterski worked on the CMS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider. At 21, Gonzalez Pasterski spoke at Harvard about her concepts of "the Triangle" and "Spin Memory", and completed "the Triangle" for EM during an invited talk at MIT's Center for Theoretical Physics. This work has formed the basis for further work, with one 2015 paper describing it as "a recently discovered universal triangle connecting soft theorems, symmetries and memory in gauge and gravitational theories." At 22, she spoke at a Harvard Faculty Conference about whether or not those concepts should be applied to black hole hair and discussed her new method for detecting gravitational waves.
In early 2016, a paper by Stephen Hawking, Malcolm J. Perry, and Andrew Strominger (Gonzalez Pasterski's doctoral advisor of whom she was working independently at the time) titled "Soft Hair on Black Holes" cited Gonzalez Pasterski's work, making hers the only one of twelve single-author papers referenced that was authored by a female scientist. This resulted in extensive media coverage after its appearance on the arXiv and in the days leading up to it.
Awards and honors
Media coverage
Shortly after the 2016 Hawking paper was released, actor George Takei referenced Pasterski on his Twitter account with her quote, "'Hopefully I'm known for what I do and not what I don't do.' A poignant sentiment." The Steven P. Jobs Trust article included in the tweet has been shared over 527,000 times.
International coverage of the paper and Pasterski's work subsequently appeared in Russia Today, Poland's Angora newspaper and DNES in the Czech Republic. In 2016, rapper Chris Brown posted a page with a video promoting Pasterski. Forbes and The History Channel ran stories about Pasterski for their audiences in Mexico and Latin America respectively. People en Español, one of the most widely read Spanish language magazines, featured Pasterski in their April 2016 print edition.