10/08/2026
In celebration of Hispanic Heritage Month, we highlight Sabrina Gonzalez Pasterski, Physicist. Pasterski is a first-generation Cuban-American, She was always fascinated by STEM topics, even building and flying her own single-engine plane at age 14.
Pasterski earned her Bachelor’s degree in Physics from MIT, graduating with a 5.0 GPA and earning her the title of the first female to graduate #1 from MIT Physics.
In 2014, while at Harvard, Pasterski and her colleagues discovered the “spin memory effect,” which allows for the detection/verification of the net effects of gravitational waves. This granted her academic freedom, allowing her to publish an individual paper on her findings in 2015. This individual paper, along with two that she was a co-author of, was cited by Stephen Hawking in 2016.
Her dissertation was published in Physics Report, making her the second-ever Ph.D. candidate from Harvard to accomplish such a feat. Pasterski earned her Ph.D. in 2019 and completed a Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Princeton Centre for Theoretical Science after graduating.
At just 27 years old, Pasterski has some amazing accomplishments already under her belt: at age 19, she was named “30 under 30” in Scientific American, in 2012, was named in Forbes’s “30 under 30” Science List, and later made the All-Star list in 2015.
Pasterski is an advocate for women in STEM. She’s done incredible work with “Let Girls Learn” to help girls around the world achieve a quality education, which has received White House recognition.
