Erik Demaine is an Assistant Professor in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He received his PhD in Computer Science from University of Waterloo in 2001, and then joined the MIT faculty.

Demaine has published over 150 papers with over 100 collaborators. His research interests range throughout algorithms, from data structures for improving web searches to understanding how proteins fold.

Last year he received a MacArthur Fellowship as a "computational geometer tackling and solving difficult problems related to folding and bending—moving readily between the theoretical and the playful, with a keen eye to revealing the former in the latter".