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“As a Futurist”

The Many Roles and Impacts of Professor Alison Barth

“You have to think forward. as a futurist. What are we going to be thinking about, what are we going to need in 5 years, right? What are the things we haven’t considered yet?” My professor, Alison Barth, sat across from me in her office, in the midst of our hour-long discussion about her research, her world, and her life. A teacher and researcher in the Biology Department at Carnegie Mellon as well as a full-time mom, Professor Barth is a futurist in a myriad of ways. She pushes to know which
questions are the right ones to ask in research, appreciating the opportunity to hear novel and new ideas from people that think differently through her role as a teacher.

“I love to look at it from a lot of different directions to see if its really right. Being able to be there, to be the one that’s looking at something and–” she picked up the stapler sitting in front of her and demonstrated “–looking underneath it and inside it to really make sure that really? It works like that?”

Along with her impressive roles in the neuroscience community and at CMU, Professor Barth also balances being a mother, wife, and mentor to many; through these, her work for the future is less novel but just as important as she guides and supports many young and growing people. Unsurprisingly, as she said, this life “is not for the faint of heart.”

Asking the Right Questions

“One of the things that’s so exciting about research is being right there when you see something for the first time that no one’s ever seen before… Either you have a new way of looking at something or you’re asking a question that didn’t even occur to people to ask before.”

Asking the right question is a foundational part of being a futurist. In class, she has already given one other beautiful example of when, through many experiments, the neuroscience community stumbled upon the right question. It was when Professor Barth was in graduate school; there was an ongoing and drawn-out argument over what controlled a certain feature of how neurons pass information on to the next neuron (long-term potentiation, for you neuroscience nerds). As we were talking, Professor Barth shared another time this happened. It was thought that there were a number of types of neurons but about 10 years ago we learned that there are at least 60 molecularly distinct types.

“It’s like we were seeing in black and white and — all of a sudden– everything’s in color!”

Asking the right question is a difficult part of both research and preparing for the future. “Because sometimes you don’t know,” Professor Barth defends us all. “You’re so constrained by these models you build up in your head that sometimes you can’t even imagine that there’s another possible reality.” But, one exciting reality is that through careful experimentation and analysis of the results, we can stumble our ways to figuring out what the mechanisms or processes truly are; the data and the experiments will eventually lead us to the truth.

“And that’s what I really love about science,” Professor Barth gushed, looking up to meet my eyes across a diagram she was drawing for me. “It’s that you’re stuck thinking about, ‘okay this is the way things have to be.’ It could be x or y, and then all of a sudden you’re just like ‘Oh my god; I didn’t realize that there could be z!’”

Of course, these realizations don’t come overnight or without work. Professor Barth explains that she sees her work fitting into the field in a way that hopefully catalyzes these realizations. She said, “I can see where the field feels like it got stuck a little bit, where I can branch out and do something a little bit different.”

Her current work includes studying the networks built in our brains in learning. Professor Barth does acknowledge the exciting ramifications that realizations in this area can have for computers, machine learning, and AI (artificial intelligence).

However, she is also interested in how she can use computers for her own work. Professor Barth pointed out that a special part of being at Carnegie Mellon to her is that one is constantly thinking of what a computer could do for us.

She explains, “Because, we don’t want people to do the things that machines can do, right? We want people to do the things that only people can do.” Professor Barth wants to leverage the unique things that make us human– our creativity, intuition, and faith– and to integrate computers seamlessly with humanity in ways that add value to our lives.

Pushing Back against Mistakes of the Past

Sadly, the limitations of current knowledge are not the only obstacle to Professor Barth’s futurist thinking.

As many know, there are challenges specific to women in any discipline where mostly men make up the authority structure. It’s not simply a historical structure that women must power through, but also biases and negative actions from people of both genders, whether conscious or unconscious.

“It’s all about power, and people use those expectations of me partly as a way to exert their own power and to put me into some sort of place that they’d like me to be.”

As expected, this can be a hindrance to growth in the field and makes it more difficult to focus on bringing science into the future. While Professor Barth does wish the scientific community would mature and focus on the research instead of the gender, sex, or race of the experimenter, she does think that it’s better than it used to be.

However, she goes on to say, “I think most of the time people are very civilized but I think once you press them a little, it’s really easy for them– and it’s easy for both men and women– to fall back on those tropes; it’s easy for people to say that someone is not enough like the type of men who have dominated a field for so long.”

The neuroscience community is, like many others, making positive steps towards having equal representation. This isn’t always easy and there are multifaceted complications to the process.

During her involvement in the preparation and production of a neuroscience conference for the two past years, Professor Barth saw first hand one of these
complications. In the first year, she was a member of the group deciding who they would have come and present their research at the conference. This group had a directive to ensure balance and diversity among the presenters. Professor Barth saw that this led to what many thought of as not that great of a conference. She explains that one complication to fixing the conference this year is that “mediocre women stick out like a sore thumb and then there’s a dozen mediocre men and you’re thinking ‘Oh yeah, whatever.’”

Because of this different expectation for men versus women, as she prepared to lead the selection of presenters for the next conference, she didn’t want the diversity balance to be the focus. However, Professor Barth quickly noticed why diversity being a focus must often be a direct objective.

“We brainstormed for about 45 minutes and this guy could not think of a single woman.” Professor Barth goes on to say, “I don’t wanna be the person that has to say ‘Okay, let’s find some diversity,’ but, it just so happens that when you ask a bunch of majority men to find people who they’ve noticed, they end up being a bunch of majority men.”

Perhaps then the changes that need to be made to help move the neuroscience community into the future are not at the administrative level. Instead, as Professor Barth explains, the scientists themselves need to make sure to not only socialize with other scientists just like them. So much of excelling in the scientific (and any) community is dependent upon who you know and who knows you. Because of this, individuals must then be conscientious in reaching out to others to ensure the best research is being supported and prepare the field for the future as best as possible.

Impacting Future Generations

Not all of Professor Barth’s ways in which she is a futurist are big, flashy, or novel. Being a teacher and a parent, might be the least celebrated but most important. Professor Barth prepares the world for the future with teaching through the knowledge she passes on and the impacts she makes on her students.

As many know, the teacher is also impacted and influenced by her students. Specifically, one thing that Professor Barth appreciates is that young people have different backgrounds than her. “Students are this completely broad cross-section which show me all sorts of new and different ways to think about things.” To her, students not only are the future, but also are helping the field even now to prepare for where it should be in the future.

Another large part of Professor Barth’s life through which she is helping shape the future is her role as a parent. I got to see first-hand evidence of how she balances doing the demanding work that comes with being a parent alongside her already hefty load.

As we were talking, she broke off, looking over my shoulder, and said, “Come on in.” Professor Barth’s daughter walked in the room, giving me a shy smile before
asking her mom a quick question.

“You asked about work life balance, well there it is,” she said as her daughter left. She talked further about a unique way that she shares the work side of her life with her family.

“I travel quite a bit for my research; I often take my family with me. I think that’s been a huge privilege for them and I love doing it.” Not only does she get more family time, but also her kids get a set of amazing experiences, from seeing how the international science community works to understanding about the different cultures and societies that exist in our world.

Parenting is not all fun and games, and like every other thing in Professor Barth’s life, it requires some sacrifice from her. As she said, “The prize is that I get to do something exciting and I have a fulfilling home life and great kids… The penalty is I’m sick today and it would have been really nice to stay at home and lay in bed.” But through her investment in this area of her life, Professor Barth has another way in which she’s preparing her children for the future as well as helping shape the future through the lives of her children and who they will become.

Moving Forward

A large part of being a futurist is about looking at the world in ways we haven’t yet dreamed of. We often build up models in our head of how the world works and because of that can sometimes miss what’s really happening. Being aware of this and constantly looking at something from multiple angles can help both ourselves to figure out what’s going on in a situation and then help us make an impact on the world. Being a futurist, however, doesn’t come without it’s hurdles. Sexism and discrimination of many kinds are serious problems, but managing it can be very complicated. The best thing for us (in any field) to do is to be conscientious, step out of our comfort zones, and reach out to people that aren’t exactly like us.

However, Professor Barth shows that being a futurist isn’t just about taking big steps to shake up the scientific community or change society. The impact we make on the lives of those around us is real and powerful. It isn’t always easy to be kind or welcoming or warm, and sometimes we need an external reason or motivation to try to be like that. Nevertheless, the positive impacts that Professor Barth has on her students (like myself), her children, and those around her are in large part due to her efforts to be kind, available, open-minded, and present.

Kindness is at the heart of being a futurist. If we plan on sustaining and improving our society and our world long into the future, we need to take care of the gifts we’ve been given. We must be kind to those that think differently than us. We must be kind to our peers, friends, and family. And most of all, we must be kind to ourselves and acknowledge our weaknesses, constantly striving to correct them.