Sarah Jane Witherspoon is an American mathematician interested in topics in abstract algebra, including Hochschild cohomology[SW99] and quantum groups.

[1] Witherspoon graduated from Arizona State University in 1988,[1] where she earned the Charles Wexler Mathematics Prize as the best mathematics student at ASU that year.

[2] She went on to graduate study in mathematics at the University of Chicago, and completed her Ph.D. in 1994.

[1] Her dissertation, supervised by Jonathan Lazare Alperin, was The Representation Ring of the Quantum Double of a Finite Group.

[1] She was elected to the 2018 class of fellows of the American Mathematical Society, "for contributions to representation theory and cohomology of Hopf algebras, quantum groups, and related objects, and for service to the profession and mentoring".