Erin Hansen
[Image Description]: Erin smiling into a selfie at the Philadelphia science festival. She wears a black shirt and has her hair tied up. She wears a grey metal pendant around her neck. On her shirt are pinned three buttons. The first is yellow with a blue border that reads "I support women in STEM". The second and third are green squares that read "I am a scientist" and "I teach future scientists". Both of the green squares have the science festival logo, which is a double helix on its side leading into the phrase "Philadelphia Science Festival". Erin is clearly sitting on the curb of a street, with large blocky buildings in the background. Over her left shoulder is a circular sign reading "Zone 6"
[Image description]: Erin posing at a cleanroom glovebox which contains the CUORE construction robotic arm. The arm has small rubber grips which are prepared to grab a crystal in order to prepare it for processing. Erin is wearing a bunny suit, mask, and hairnet. She sits in front of an inverted glove and is staring up at the camera through multiple panes of plexiglass. Behind her is complicated instrumentation for pressure control.
[Image Description]: Erin taking a selfie in the clean room at UCLA. She wears a hairnet and black thick rimmed glasses and a blue medical mask. Around her neck is a blue lanyard reading "UCLA nanolab" in gold font. Behind her left shoulder, underneath fluorescent lights, is the machinery of the nanolab in bright white and shiny silver.
Postdoctoral physics researcher with multiple disabilities and neurodivergence
Tell us about your STEM? What do you do, what do you love about it, what brought you to the field?
I’m a postdoctoral researcher in physics at Berkeley, with multiple disabilities and neurodivergence. My Bachelor's, Master's, and Ph.D are all in nuclear physics and particle physics, looking at properties of neutrinos. We look for a super rare decay that can teach us about the nature of neutrinos and hopefully tell us about matter and antimatter in the universe.
This is trying to help us understand the fundamentals of matter versus antimatter. Right after the Big Bang, matter and antimatter should have been created in equal quantities, but they weren't, which is why we have a matter dominated universe. Neutrinos are one of the ways we can access the math of that theory and see what was really going on.
But the real issue is how do we even build instruments to measure and study this; that, and finding new ways to use technology that we've already developed, is most of my day-to-day work. I proposed a couple of projects that will take the detector module that we work with now that only has sensors on one side and question ‘what if we had detectors on both sides and multiple detectors on every side of the instrument’. How does that change our perspective?
As for my personal work, a lot of the stuff that I do is working with discarded ideas or discarded data. Most of my work is actually asking, ‘is there anything interesting in there?’ and ‘how do we manipulate the way that we've structured our detector unintentionally?’.
I identify as disabled. I have been struggling with sleep disorders my entire life, because of this I suffer from chronic fatigue. I was diagnosed with anxiety in my undergrad, and very recently I’ve realized that a lot of my anxiety is actually coming from undiagnosed ADHD. I also have a pulmonary condition (not yet identified), which means that I am at a higher risk of getting Covid.
Because of the pandemic I’ve shifted away from my in-person project. I’ve started taking on other responsibilities in computing and mentoring - most of the time I can do it from home, which is really fortunate. The thing that gets me up in the morning is working with students. That’s always been my favorite thing, teaching and mentoring. If you asked me to do a different field in physics altogether but it still involved working with students, I would be happy. I would always choose the having-students part.
What accommodations allow you to thrive?
Unofficial accommodations have worked for me in the past. The first time I ever actually asked for official accommodations was when I was doing my qualifying exams because I was getting panic attacks related to the exams. I asked that I be allowed to leave the room to go to the bathroom to take my panic meds. I was more mortified that I would interrupt somebody else taking the exam than I was about actually needing the accommodation.
Behavioral therapy - CBT and EMDR - has been useful for dealing with PTSD and anxiety. I also see an ADHD coach (which I recognize is not accessible to everybody) - it would be really great if I didn’t have to pay for this. That’s about behavioral interventions. What are the things that you need to do, as opposed to the things you need to feel and think you need to? There’s been a lot of mechanically changing the way that I live my life and the way that I work. You can't train away ADHD, there's just no way to do it. You have to work towards understanding that your brain accesses the world differently. The same is true for a lot of other mental health issues.
I have a Livescribe pen that records what I write, and that's been extremely useful to me, because writing down things not only implants them in memory, but I also no longer have to take notes on the computer to send them out. I can just copy and paste.
There's a lot of other pieces that I wish were there, because, even though I don't need them directly, they still make my life easier. For example, if I could record and have transcripts of meetings, that would be amazing. I do also use auto-generated captions for virtual meetings.
What do you want people to know about being disabled in STEM?
One of the things I worry about is my work week. The actual time that I spend on work is about 30 hours a week, and that is low for my field. I've had to fight a lot of ableism surrounding that, both internally and externally. I don't work on weekends (except for some deadlines). If I work more than 5 or 6 hours in a day, I get burnt out. That's partly fatigue, there’s a certain amount of energy that is involved. I'm sure you know the spoons metaphor, and half of my spoons go immediately into maintenance, as opposed to having them accessible to me to choose what to do with. Normalizing, taking sick days, normalizing, taking vacation, normalizing a not-100-hour work week, and not glorifying the grindstone. Those are not necessarily accommodations, but those are definitely pieces, this could also help neurotypical people. We want to avoid burnout.
Are there any important parts to your story that we haven’t asked about?
The piece that would have really changed my life would have been an earlier diagnosis of ADHD. Nobody warned me about the grief of having a diagnosis. Not that I'm sad that I was diagnosed, but that my life could have been better before that. The first couple of weeks I was in tears because I was thinking about my dissertation. It was my dissertation that led my psychiatrist to say I needed to get tested for ADHD. I was experiencing barriers to getting started on work; or when I started work, I would blink and 7 hours had gone past. Or I’d forget to eat, or not take care of myself. There was a moment of realization that there is treatment for ADHD, both medical and behavioral. If I had known, I think that my writing, my dissertation, and my life would have been easier. And that realization was hard, because doing my dissertation was hard.
Discovering the community was extremely validating, there is a lot of joy in the community. So there’s this mismatch of really emotional grief and accepting the diagnosis, and the joy developing identity around it. I’m not defined by my ADHD, but a portion of my life is accepting a new normal.
I think the most useful thing that I found has been surrounding myself with people that share these sorts of issues and perspectives. I play DnD for example,and many in my group also have ADHD. There's a lot of processing that you can do in those spaces. As I've been writing out a new campaign, I’ve been thinking a lot about how there’s a certain element of control that you get. You can create a world where things are different, where there are no triggers or certain topics can be left out. That’s really empowering: I can create drama without relying on tropes or classic problems. It’s escapism.
