Sarah Hemminger

Sarah Hemminger is a social entrepreneur, scientist, and ice dancer who co-founded Thread with her husband Ryan Hemminger in 2004. Equipped with the fundamental understanding that we all need deep interpersonal bonds to thrive, Sarah knows that caring relationships have the power to radically and permanently alter the social support structure of everyone involved. She has fourteen years of experience in nonprofit management and expertise in the development, expansion, and replication of innovative, paradigm-shifting models of forming relationships across lines of difference between high school students, volunteers and collaborators. Sarah was awarded fellowships from Ashoka, Echoing Green Foundation, Open Society Institute, and the Albert Schweitzer Fellows Program, which support social entrepreneurs with innovative ideas. In 2010, Sarah received her Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering from the Johns Hopkins University for her work on the role of the cerebellum and the primary motor cortex on the time scales of consolidation of motor memory. She received the prestigious Siebel Scholars Award for outstanding work in the field of technology and engineering. Her research was published in the Journal of Neuroscience, Journal of Neurophysiology, and Cerebral Cortex and she has lectured internationally on her work. Sarah received her undergraduate degree from the Johns Hopkins University in 2002, and prior to pursuing her PhD, she worked as an engineer for Medtronic XOMED.