2022 User Meeting Career Panel

Tom Hogan graduated from Boston College with a PhD in Physics where his studies focused on the effects of charge doping on correlated electron systems. As part of that work, he synthesized materials and characterized them using x-ray and neutron diffraction techniques at several national user facilities. Techniques employed included triple-axis diffraction, REXS, RIXS, and time-of-flight Laue diffraction. Presently, as an Applications Scientist, Tom supports customers leveraging Quantum Design’s suite of measurement options to quantify electrical, magnetic, and thermal properties at cryogenic temperatures and high magnetic fields, as well as extending the utility of those tools for custom applications.

Terry McAfee is a first generation college student born and raised in California. He went to CSU Chico for a BS in Physics. He continued his physics education at North Carolina State University (NCSU), where he received a Ph.D researching the properties of organic solar cells using x-rays. After a postdoc at Tulane University researching automated control of polymer synthesis, he return to the ALS as a postdoc developing a technique for in-situ soft x-ray scattering of polymers in solution. In May 2021, Terry was hired by the ALS as a scientific engineering associate for the Ambient Pressure XPS program.

Edbert Sie is an optical systems scientist at Reality Labs Research at Meta (formerly Facebook). His research interests lie at the intersection of human-computer interfaces, biosensing, and AR/VR. His recent projects include developing high-sensitivity optical systems to measure neural activity towards a brain-computer interface. He received his PhD in physics from MIT in 2017 and was a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford until 2019, where he led research in ultrafast optics from THz, XUV, to electron diffraction in quantum materials.

Dr. Toma is a Staff Scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the Technology Lead for Photoelectrochemistry in the HydroGEN Consortium. At LBNL, she is also the Program Lead for the Liquid Sunlight Alliance. She is an expert in materials synthesis and characterization. In her career, she has worked with several classes of materials spanning energy research and nanomedicine. She got her PhD in Italy at the International School of Advanced Studies, before moving as a postdoc at the University of California Santa Barbara first, and Berkeley afterwards.

She received several awards including being selected as one of the “100 Women of Materials Science” by the Royal Society of Chemistry in 2018, the ACS Rising Star Award in 2021, and in 2022 she became an Oppenheimer fellow in the Oppenheimer Science and Leadership Program of the National Laboratory Directors’ Council.