Kriti Mehrotra
As a limited drama series that retells the incredible tale of Natalia Grace through the perspective of all those involved, Hulu’s ‘Good American Family’ is truly unlike any other. That’s because it shines a light on not only what transpired between the Barnett family after they adopted someone they believed to be a little girl with dwarfism but also the aftermath of it all. Amongst those to be caught up in the middle of it all was Jacob Barnett, Kristine and Michael Barnett’s eldest biological son, whose autism had led him to become a science prodigy.
Jacob Barnett Surpassed All Expectations Following His Autism Diagnosis
Born on May 26, 1998, in Indianapolis, Indiana, to Kristine and Michael Barnett as the eldest of their three biological sons, Jacob Barnett has always had a special place in his parents’ lives. However, everything turned upside down for the family in around 2000, when the two-year-old was diagnosed with autism, with the doctors actually telling his parents he would never be able to lead a normal life. In fact, owing to his moderate to severe level on the spectrum with Asperger’s Syndrome, the doctors actually believed he would never even be able to tie his shoelaces or read.
Yet, Jacob’s parents didn’t give up on him and actually enrolled him in a nearby public school that had a special education program. According to reports, it was his mother who noticed that he showed no interest in school lessons and wasn’t really improving, so she took him out in third grade. She then began homeschooling him and letting him focus on the subjects that interested him, just for it to turn out that he was essentially a math and science whiz. He even taught himself algebra, geometry, and calculus in two short weeks when he realized he could then move ahead to college-level education.
Jacob was just 10 years old when Indiana University accepted him as a student and allowed him to earn his undergraduate degree, where he specialized in his interests and achieved a perfect GPA. As if that’s not enough, at the age of 12, he published his first research paper in the prestigious journal Physical Review A, becoming the youngest ever individual to do so. He memorized over 200 digits of pi in a single afternoon, began pursuing his Master’s degree at age 13, and even became the youngest paid astrophysics researcher ever, all while his family was allegedly dealing with troubles at home due to his adopted sister Natalia Grace.
Jacob Barnett Has Opened Up About His Experiences With Natalia Grace
While Jacob Barnett has primarily remained away from the limelight, considering he was just 12 when his parents adopted Natalia Grace and 14 when they allegedly abandoned her, he has since expressed his own opinions on the matter. According to his own accounts in Investigation Discovery’s ‘The Curious Case of Natalia Grace,’ he admitted that he was fearful of her because she often threatened to harm him, his brothers, and their parents. However, he conceded that his mother wasn’t entirely innocent since she was allegedly quite abusive towards her and controlling about the whole situation, which made things worse at home. He said this about the same woman who had published, ‘The Spark: A Mother’s Story of Nurturing, Genius, and Autism,’ a memoir about raising him in 2013.
As per Jacob, there was once even a time that his mother forced him to urinate on Natalia’s bed, which is something he continues to feel guilty about despite not knowing any better at the time. He may have always had a photographic memory as well as an IQ of 170 (more than Albert Einstein), but he was just a child at the time, and he did what his mother asked of him. I kinda feel like [I was] a Nazi following orders, in a way,” he said before adding Natalia definitely wasn’t “treated fairly… I hope she understands I’m apologetic. I’ve had a lot of time to really think about stuff and grow up.”
Jacob Barnett is Soaring as an Astrophysicist and May Even Earn a Nobel Prize One Day
It was in 2013 that Jacob enrolled at the Perimeter Institute at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada, to further his education, just to earn his Independent Physics degree 2 years later. His thesis was on Fermion Doubling in Loop Quantum Gravity, and that is what he continued to focus on as the years passed by as a researcher and a Ph.D. student. Quantum Theory, Theoretical Physics, and Mathematics became his core points, and he even gave a TEDx Talk in 2012 titled ‘Forget What You Know.’ From what we can tell, he earned his Ph.D in 2023 from the University of Waterloo with a thesis called ‘Locality and Exceptional Points in Pseudo-Hermitian Physics’ and has already made significant contributions in his research as an Astrophysicist.
Jacob once revealed that his research is devoted to studying problems related to many particles in the extension of standard quantum mechanics, particularly their interaction in minimal energy states. This has even led him to build and continue building a series of mathematical models that expand on Albert Einstein’s Field of Relativity, which means he may even be on his way to earning a Nobel Prize one day. As of now, though, the Indiana native turned long-time Ontario resident is based out of Bilbao, Spain, where he serves as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Basque Center for Applied Mathematics.
The nearly 27-year-old science prodigy took up this position in the summer of 2024, all the while remaining dedicated to his passion for foosball. In fact, the researcher and BCAM course maths educator has even started organizing foosball tournaments—his first was in late February 2025. As if that’s not enough, Jacob Barnett is the founder of Wheel LLC and cofounder of Jacob’s Place, a center and safe space for children with autism.
Read More: Antwon and Cynthia Mans: Where are Natalia Grace’s Guardians Now?
