Sarah Demers

Sarah Demers is an American physicist and the Horace D. Taft associate professor of physics at Yale University.

Early life and education

Demers graduated from Phillips Andover Academy in 1994. Demers has an A.B. in Physics from Harvard University. In 2001 she received an M.A. from the University of Rochester, and in 2005 she earned her Ph.D. from the University of Rochester. At Rochester, her doctoral advisor was Kevin McFarland.
She taught at Roberts Wesleyan University before accepting a postdoctoral position during which time she worked in Geneva at CERN. In 2009 she moved to Yale University where, as of 2022, she is the Horace D. Taft associate professor of physics at Yale University.
At Yale, Demers co-teaches a class at Yale on the Physics of Dance with fellow professor Emily Coates, and Demers appears in Coates' 2015 show 'Incarnations'.

Demers is a particle physicist. As an undergraduate she worked in the laboratory of Melissa Franklin and made sheets of gold-coated Mylar into detectors for tracking elemental particles. Her work examines charged particles to find new methods in physics beyond the accepted Standard Model. Demers was part of the team who discovered the Higgs boson, and her work is conducted at the Large Hadron Collider. Demers also works on the ATLAS experiment and the Mu2e experiments.

In 2011 Demers received an early career award from the United States' Department of Energy.
She was named a Fellow of the American Physical Society in 2023, "for important contributions to tau lepton triggering and identification and using the tau signature in the study of Higgs production and decay, and for important leadership both within the ATLAS collaboration and the broader physics community".