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Helena native and Carroll graduate Emily Speranza is breaking the mold with her math and biology double major by pursuing a doctoral degree in a field she says is dominated by men.
In the fall, she is starting a fellowship, which includes full tuition and a stipend, at Boston University, where she will peruse a doctoral degree in a field called bioinformatics.
“It’s computational biology,” she said on a recent afternoon in Helena. She explained the field involves doing a lot of programming for data analysis, data mining and “basically doing biology on a computer.”
She says she is just one of two female first-year students enrolled in the program.
“Math and engineering tends to be completely male dominated,” she said. “Actually, at Carroll we’re really lucky we have a female math professor who brings in a lot of girls, so I think this year we have a more girls graduating than guys, which is really not the norm. Females tend to stick more to the biology and social sciences in general.”
Eventually, she says, she would like to work for the National Institute of Health or a similar government group doing lab work. Read more of this story