Education and early life
Pasterski was born in Chicago, Illinois, [1] to Mark Pasterski and Maria Gonzalez, [2] both lawyers. [3] She is of Polish and Cuban descent. [4] She attended elementary school at the Edison Regional Gifted Center beginning in 1998. [1]
At a young age, Pasterski had developed an interest in spaceflight and aircraft. [2] She received a Cessna 150 for her birthday from her grandfather [5] and her father, also a pilot, took her to Canada where she could take flying lessons. Beginning at age 12, she spent two years [6] building a Zenith CH 601 XL from a kit, [2] making several modifications for which she sought airworthiness certification. [7] She was allowed to perform a flight test with a certified flight instructor prior to the National Transportation Safety Board grounding all aircraft based on the Zenith kit [8] [9] due to several accidents. [2]
Pasterski attended high school at the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy. [10] While there, she was a semifinalist for the selection of the team representing the United States in the International Physics Olympiad, [2] and held an internship at Blue Origin. [11] She graduated in 2010. [1]
She began an undergraduate degree at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Fall 2010, [2] after she was rejected by Harvard College and originally wait listed by MIT. [10] She was selected off of the wait list for the aerospace engineering program [12] due to the aircraft she had built when she was younger. [7] While there, she became the first freshman to be named to the NASA January Operational Internship [13] and was among those awarded MIT's inaugural Freshman Entrepreneurship Award. [14] In 2011, she held an internship at NASA's Kennedy Space Center. [11] After changing majors to Physics, [12] she did research involving the Compact Muon Solenoid experiment at CERN. [15] She received a Bachelor of Science in Physics in 2013, after three years of attendance and as the first woman in decades to graduate MIT at the top of their class in the physics program [6] and win a Joel Matthew Orloff scholarship award [5] [16] with a 5.0 Grade Point Average. [5]
She then entered a postgraduate education program at Harvard, receiving a Hertz Fellowship. [6] While a graduate student at Harvard, she worked under the advisement of Andrew Strominger [17] and developed an interest in quantum gravity. [7] She, Strominger, and another colleague, Alexander Zhiboedov, discovered a novel gravitational memory effect, a connection which Pasterski found between symmetries and a spin memory effect that can be observed in gravitational waves. [18]
She obtained a Doctor of Philosophy from Harvard in Physics in 2019. [11]
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