Women in STEM and beyond: meet Emma Barton

STEM and beyond celebrates women in the disciplines of science, technology, engineering, and math as well as other fields in which women are currently underrepresented. This second installment celebrates Berkeley brain enthusiast, Emma Barton.

Do women belong in the STEM fields? Is the Pope Catholic? Is Berkeley the #1 public school in the world? DUH. Still, Emma Barton has faced the occasional naysayer. In her explosively successful article for The Tab last month, Emma reported that she was told women in STEM are “naturally less capable” than their male counterparts.

Please.

Luckily, she’s not letting comments like these get her down, because she has work to do. Eventually, she hopes to complete a PhD in neuroscience and devote her time to research, where hopes to contribute to answering some of the big questions in the field.

“A huge question in the field is if the mind is anything beyond the electrical and chemical activity in your brain and I would love to contribute to that in some way in my career.”

For now, she plans to declare her undergraduate major in cognitive science, which combines two of her favorite topics.

“I’ve always been interested in the mind and brain so I was conflicted between psych and neuro. Then I found cognitive science which allows you to study both, so I went with that.”

With nearly all As so far, she’s certainly headed in the right direction. As she continues her undergraduate education here, she is looking forward to taking advantage of classes on the philosophy of the mind and the neuroscience of disease. She also hopes to get involved with undergraduate research, which should help prepare her for answering some of those big questions.

So much for less capable!

When she’s not busy excelling in STEM, she’s excelling the beyond.  Emma’s getting the most out of the Berkeley experience by taking advantage of extracurriculars, including AFX dance and writing for The Tab UC Berkeley, where she was the #1 reporter last month. Her favorite experience, however, has been the debate team.

“I am on the APDA debate team and that has been one of the best parts of my college experience so far. I have learned so much from all of the people in debate about the various issues we debate about and about arguments and critical analysis in general from looking at argument structure all the time. It has also just been really fun to spend time with the people on the team whether its flying across the country to tournaments or writing cases or having mock debates where we debate something ridiculous just for fun. Debate has easily been one of the most fun and most educational parts of college for me so far.”

Is there anything this rockstar can’t do?

Find the previous installment of Women in STEM and beyond here.