Hana Schiff Toman is a 3rd year PhD candidate in condensed matter theory who also ran the department’s social media pages for the past two years. She is one of the Science Communication Fellows for the School of Physical Sciences, representing our Department of Physics & Astronomy since Fall of 2022. Hana runs the Department’s Instagram, X (Twitter), and Facebook account and is responsible for advertising departmental, school-wide, and campus-wide events, as well as highlighting news and accomplishments within the department. Since Hana’s involvement, the engagement on the department’s social media platforms has increased five-fold.
Regarding her research, Hana first got interested in this field during her master’s studies in Belgrade, Serbia. At UCI, Hana works with Professor Judit Romhanyi using symmetry-based techniques to understand complex magnetic and topological phenomena, research that deals with the intersection of magnetism, symmetries and topology. With Judit and our international collaborators, she is working on developing the Landau theory for so-called “altermagnets,” a strange type of magnetic order with promising applications in the field of spintronics. In addition to clarifying the nature of altermagnets, she hopes to eventually explore how topology can give rise to multiferroic behavior. Multiferroic materials are ones in which the electric and magnetic properties are intertwined. When asked about the future, Hana said she is weighing possible careers in academia versus industry, leaning more towards academia. Ideally, she would love to become a tenured faculty somewhere, as she enjoys blending physics with the opportunity to make physics spaces more friendly and welcoming. She also considers science communication careers as another possible path in the future.
As a Science Communication Fellow, Hana is responsible for advertising events, including the various departmental and sub-field seminars and colloquia, awards, nominations, grants and publications. In addition, Hana works to highlight the people and organizations within our department. She has highlighted almost a dozen research groups (over forty individuals, including faculty, postdocs, graduate students, and undergraduate researchers), giving each individual researcher a spotlight of their own. Her favorite part about these highlights is getting to meet everyone in the department – and getting to learn about everybody’s unique story and what motivates them as a physicist and as a person. Hana has also highlighted most of the graduate student-led organizations within our department, including PGC, UNITY, PACE, and RQFT. See the bottom of this article for a full list of features.
When asked about how she became a Science Communication Fellow, Hana said she always wanted to start her own social media platforms relating to physics. When she heard about the SciComm fellowship, she felt it was low-stress opportunity to learn some of the basics about maintaining a platform and designing media. Hana says she strongly believes in the value of science communication, as it pertains to explaining actual science as well as the stories of how science is created and the people who work in science. She explains there are many more ways platforms can contribute to changing the narrative about how science stories are told. Secondly, she enjoys helping get the department together after Covid, and at the very least, advertising events to the students of what is going on in a given week. In the future, Hana is working on two projects: an undergraduate advice series, and a series on destigmatizing challenges in failures on the career path to becoming a professional physicist.
Hana says to anyone who is interested in science communication, to just start to post, even if you don’t think it is perfect. She also mentions Canva as an amazing tool for designing posts, and there are excellent free photo-editing programs out there both for the phone and computer. She is available to chat about this if there is anybody out there who is interested in learning more!
Finally, Hana outside of research and science communication has various hobbies, like music (piano & guitar), doodling, photography and recharging with social outings. For work productivity, she tries to re-arrange her work low- and high-productivity days in order to prevent burnout and keep her healthy, happy and on top of her obligations. She also keeps very detailed to-do lists, grouped by tasks that bare-minimum need to get done this week and those tasks that it would be great if they can get done this week. If she’s feeling low-energy, she will focus on one or two of the bare-minimum tasks that need to get done; if she’s motivated, she will take on more pressing tasks that day.
Listed below are links to all of the features Hana has completed to date:
Organization Features:
- RQFT (2023-24AY) – part 1: What is RQFT (parts 2 and 3 coming soon)
- UNITY (2022-23AY) – What is it, Abby, Maya, Anne-Katherine,
- PGC (2022-23AY) – What is it, Tyler, Ryan, Michael
- PACE (2022-23AY) – What is it, Jack, Stephanie, Tae, Francisco
Research Group Features (all from the 2022-23 AY)
- Michael Ratz & Mu-Chun Chen group, Victoria, Shreya, Yahya
- Sasha Chernyshev group, César Gallegos
- Tim Tait group, Anne-Katherine Burns, Tyler Smith, India Bhalla-Ladd
- Judit Romhanyi group, Matt Stern, Charles Walker, Hana Schiff
- Kev Abazajian group, Helena Garcia Escudero, Cannon Vogel
- Jin Yu group, Carmen Al Masri +2 chem students (Moises Ernesto Romero & Shannon McElhenney)
- Franklin Dollar group, Hunter Allison, Danny Attiyah, Christopher Gardner,
- Zuzanna Siwy group, DaVante Cain, Savannah Silva, Ethan Cao
- Javier Sanchez-Yamagishi group, Ian Sequiera, Aaron Bajaras-Aguilar, Yuhui Yang & Joshua Wang (undergrads), Andrew Barabas
- David Kirkby group, Abby Bault, Dylan Green, Matthew Dowicz, Adam Shandonay, Tasneem Nora Khokhar (undergrad)
Additional Features:
- Professor Aomawa Shields’ new book Life on Other Planets, posted in the context of Black History Month: Introducing the book, what inspired her to write it, to her what does it mean to love physics, and about her as a professor, author and professional actor.
- The Adventures in Physics event, (physics demonstrations for K-12 students from Orange County). This year was focused on momentum, and there was a cool cannon demonstration.
