Chicago woman dubbed ‘next Einstein’ built her first plane at 13 and flew it solo

Sabrina Gonzalez Pasterski was being called the next Einstein long before most people had even heard her name.

But the story didn’t start in a lab or behind a desk.

It started with a Chicago kid who became obsessed with flying and took it further than anyone could have expected.

And by the time most teens were figuring out how to drive, she was already in the air alone.

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The plane Sabrina Gonzalez Pasterski built and flew before most teens could drive

Before MIT, before Harvard, Sabrina Gonzalez Pasterski’s story started out with her taking flight lessons at nine years old. 

But pretty quickly, flying wasn’t enough. 

She wanted to understand the machine itself, not just sit inside it.

So in her early teens, she started building one.

Not a model plane. 

Not a project kit you finish in a weekend. 

A real, single-engine aircraft – a Cessna 150 – built in her family’s garage over the course of about three years. 

She began the project around 13 years of age, working through more than 300 modifications to the airframe as she went.

Piece by piece, she put the entire thing together.

And when she was finished, the plane – known as ‘Eight Six Quebec’ – was fully airworthy.

At 16, she took it to the skies.

Solo.

Becoming the youngest person to fly their own self-built aircraft. 

At that age, most people are just starting driving lessons. 

She was already in the air, flying something she had constructed from the ground up.

And once that part was done, her focus shifted again.

To understanding what actually made it possible in the first place.

How Sabrina became known as the ‘next Einstein’

From there, Sabrina moved into physics and kept the same pace.

She completed her MIT physics degree in three years with a perfect GPA. 

Then she headed to Harvard for a PhD, focusing on the kind of topics most people struggle to even define, like gravity and spacetime.

Her work started gaining serious attention. 

In 2016, Stephen Hawking cited her research, which immediately put her on the radar in a much bigger way.

That’s when the ‘next Einstein’ label took off.

But she wasn’t interested in owning it. 

She shut it down pretty quickly, saying Einstein was Einstein, and she hadn’t done anything to deserve that comparison. 

Meanwhile, everything around her suggested otherwise. 

Meet Sabrina Gonzalez Pasterski;

>At 10, she rebuilt an airplane engine.
>At 12, she built a complete aircraft from a kit.
>At 14, she flew it solo before she could drive a car.
>At 21, she graduated #1 from MIT Physics with a perfect 5.0 GPA.
The first woman to ever do so.
>At… pic.twitter.com/JWjdnA3vdY

— Philosophy Of Physics (@PhilosophyOfPhy) February 13, 2026

Her research made its way into Harvard’s curriculum.

Her name kept coming up in conversations about the future of physics.

After earning her PhD from Harvard, she kept pushing deeper into the same questions that first pulled her in, and today, she’s a high-energy theorist at the Perimeter Institute.

There, she leads a team tackling one of physics’ biggest challenges – figuring out how spacetime and quantum theory actually connect.

Even with all of that, she’s never really framed it that way herself.

At one point, she even said she wasn’t ‘cool… not yet.’

But when you step back and look at everything Sabrina has achieved – building a plane as a kid, flying it herself, and going on to study the laws that made it possible – we’d say she’s pretty darn cool.

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