Dr Sarah Malik is a Royal Society University Research Fellow in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at University College London. Malik has worked on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) experiment and was contact author for several of the top-cited publications to come from the LHC – including the dark matter search results that put the collider on the map for dark matter. She was awarded the Institute of Physics High Energy Physics group prize for her ‘pioneering role in dark matter searches at colliders’. More recently, Malik has played a leading role in establishing the potential of quantum computers in tackling the most challenging problems in particle physics, including the simulation of parton showers and classification of track segments associated with charged particle trajectories. Malik obtained her MPhys from the University of Oxford and her PhD from University College London. She was then a postdoc at Rockefeller University and Imperial College London before being awarded a Royal Society University Research Fellowship. She is also currently the Industry Partner Liaison Officer at the UCL Centre for Doctoral Training and Data Intensive Science.