Erik Demaine is an Esther and Harold E. Edgerton Professor and Associate Professor in the department of electrical engineering and computer science, and a member of the Theory of Computation group in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He joined the faculty in 2001, and became an Associate Professor in 2005. He received his PhD in 2001 and Math in 1996 at University of Waterloo, and his BSc in 1995 at Dalhousie University.

Demaine's research interests span much of theoretical computer science and mathematics, in particular with connections to algorithms. Major research foci include discrete and computational geometry (particularly folding and unfolding of linkages, paper, polyhedra, and proteins), advanced data structures, graph algorithms, and recreational algorithms (such as the complexity of combinatorial games).