Episode 02 - Sarah Demers

Sarah Demers is the Horace D. Taft Associate Professor of Physics, and she started her lab at Yale back in 2009. Her work focuses on the ATLAS Experiment at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, which accelerates protons to near the speed of light and slams them into one another to reveal the fundamental particles and forces that underlie our universe. Sarah is also involved in collaborations with the Theater Studies and Dance Studies programs here at Yale—exploring the intersection of particle physics and physical movement—and has been a lifelong advocate for women in physics and minority groups in STEM.

In this episode, Sarah describes the critical role of communication when working on a multinational collaborative endeavor, how she advocates for her graduate students and post-docs in Switzerland from New Haven, and how she decided to pursue teaching at Roberts Wesleyan College after her PhD instead of going straight into a post-doc. Near the end of the conversation, we also discuss her experiences working for Melissa Franklin, the first tenured woman physics faculty member at Harvard.

“She was an inspiration for me… and I guess she was a role model. She seemed way too cool and knowledgeable for me to even think about emulating her, so in that way she wasn’t a very effective role model—she was way too cool!

From the first time she was really informal, and when she first gave me a tour of the lab, there was actually only one bathroom down there that was a men’s bathroom… so if I wanted to go to the bathroom I had to hang a sign on the wall. And there was no lock, so you just had to hope that people would see that sign!

I remember her showing me a stash of pads and tampons that she kept for free, you know? 'If you ever need one.' She was just so informal about everything, and she had this environment that made me feel like there was a space for me to be there. Even if it said ‘Men’s Room,’ I had something that I could put up and say, ‘Okay, there’s a space for me here.’

- Sarah Demers

Links

Demers Lab website - http://demerslab.yale.edu/

Op-Ed: The still-tolerated gender bias in science - http://blog.ted.com/op-ed-the-still-tolerated-gender-bias-in-science/