Category: Education

The power of an introduction

If you think about how we use language to interact with people, pronouns are fundamental. If I’m introducing you to my friend, I’m likely to say something like, “Hey! This is Madison—they’re a good friend of mine.” We use these introductory moments to create relatedness, yet, inadvertently, something about identity gets expressed. If we aren’t attentive to what we express about identity, we are liable to lean toward our ingrained assumptions about who and how people are. That’s not to say that the identity we construct for people when we introduce them is inherently true or inescapable—we discovered that in the forum—but regardless we are accountable for the world that gets created about people when we open our mouths.

The way I see it, there are three fundamental aspects to share or, alternatively, learn about someone in an introduction: the name the person would like to be called, how to pronounce that name, and what pronouns they use. Undoubtedly, there are other aspects that may be more applicable depending on the context, but as a base, what it is to know someone is to be able to refer to them as they would like to be referred to. 

2023 was a big year for me—it was the year I became a doctor. But let me clarify, no, not that kind of doctor. If I don’t insert myself quickly, I can find myself in way over my head. To be fair, I’m a smart cookie with a Biomedical Engineering degree, plenty of pre-med classes under my belt, and an above average MCAT score[i], but that doesn’t mean I can diagnose your rash.

What’s in a name?

For many people, their name may not be a particularly important part of their identity. Maybe their name connects them to their family because they were named after a relative or they’ve used different nicknames throughout their lives, but for the most part their name’s a given, because well, it was given. For many transgender and gender non-conforming people, the opposite is true—their name was chosen. Selected after many hours of researching names and testing them out in chat groups or with friends, their name was chosen by them.

I’ve never changed my name, but loved ones have. In the state of Wisconsin where I live, one must pay a $164.50 filing fee to file name change forms with the court, run an advertisement announcing the date of the name change hearing in the local newspaper, and attend a court hearing with a judge to change their legal name. It’s a burdensome process that somehow, every time I’ve borne witness to it, leaves people relieved. Relieved that their name is now recognized legally and the incongruence of living with a name that didn’t fit is gone. I can relate to that in terms of changing my pronouns.

During my PhD program, I looked forward to becoming a doctor so that I wouldn’t ever have to select between Ms., Mrs., or Mr. again (and for anyone who has done a doctorate, you know that it’s the little things that keep you going when it gets tough). Unfortunately, even with my doctorate there are places that force me to select between those limited options.[ii]

What’s in place of a name?

Pronouns are those “words we use instead of a noun to avoid repetition of it.”[iii] In the place of a name, they’re little words like I, we, she, they, or him. Like our names, our use of pronouns often goes unnoticed—until maybe someone uses the wrong pronoun for our pet or we hear a 3-year-old use “she” when referring to their brother. Typically, our use of personal pronouns is based on our perception of a person’s gender.[iv] For people whose outward expression of gender matches their sex assigned at birth and their internal experience of who they are, this perception might always be in alignment; however, for transgender or gender non-conforming folks this might not be the case.

I started using she/they pronouns in 2020. I can’t say exactly why, maybe because I could put it in my Zoom nametag and that felt low stakes enough. Or it may have started off as a nod to my queerness in an expression-constrained environment (Zoom)—the opportunity to say, “hey, I’m here and I’m probably not who you think I am.” Mostly no one used they/them pronouns to refer to me, but occasionally people would ask what it meant to have both “she” and “they” pronouns. Sometimes I would have that conversation with them.[v] I remember, once, recreating a Self Expression and Leadership Program[vi] classroom with a participant who called me out on that—“when you don’t know what you want me to call you, you just put that work on me when all I want to do is refer to you in a way that is comfortable for you.” I was taken aback but struck by the idea that I was making it harder for people to care for me.

It wasn’t until August of 2021 that I would start using they/them pronouns exclusively. I was deeply depressed at the time, grasping for ways to experience people’s care. For the first time, asking people to use they/them pronouns for me occurred as an invitation I could extend. I found I could invite people to meet me, newly.

Hi all, I’m Hanna Barton. I use they/them pronouns and am interested in a world where each of us is exquisitely cared for by community.

[i] The MCAT is the test you take to get into medical school. At one point I was applying for a joint MD/PhD program, eventually deciding to focus solely on the PhD—but not before I took the last in-person MCAT of 2020 on March 14th.

[ii] This is poor design that excludes people who do not use any of those prefixes.

[iii] https://www.etymonline.com/word/pronoun, accessed January 15, 2024

[iv] Judith Butler describes gender as a performance—something we learn how to perform “correctly” based on social scripts. See her 1990 book, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity.

[v] No one owes you an explanation for why they use the pronouns they use, nor do they owe you a “pronouns 101” lecture. It takes emotional work to educate around topics sensitive to one’s own identity, so my personal practice is to not ask people questions that I can google. If after my research I’m still curious about someone’s gender identity, I might ask them if they are open to a conversation about it; however, I will make it very clear that they do not owe me their time, explanation, or vulnerability.

[vi] The Self Expression and Leadership Program is a course offered as part of the Landmark Curriculum for Living. The conversation I am referring to happened during a program I head coached, where most of my interaction directly with participants was by way of “recreating” (re-capping) classrooms if they had missed them.

First published as a “Report from the Field” in The Journal of the 2024 Conference for Global Transformation.

Math Musings: We all think we are imposters

I sit down at the small round table, rubbing the hand sanitizer I’ve just gotten into my hands. It’s 12:57 p.m. on Thursday, just before my regular volunteering shift in the children’s hospital and I’m wearing my red polo and name badge. I know I’m meeting a student today, but I don’t know how old they are or what we are about to work on—the three teachers in the children’s hospital serve students across all grades, making it almost impossible to prepare. The teacher comes in to join me at the table and tells me about the student. “Today I’m going to have you work with Liam*,” she says, “I’ve worked with him before, but I think working with you might be good for him. He needs to do his math, which he gets kind of anxious about.” I nod and she hands me a stack of paper triangles. I inspect them and realize they are flashcards with numbers in the corners—she’s handed me the stack of 9’s (9*2=18, 9*3=27, and so on…). “We’ve been working on his 9’s.”

Liam was a kind, brilliant kid who not only crushed his 9’s that day, but also mastered rounding to the thousands and hundreds place. I left the hospital that day confident in myself and proud of the confidence I could instill in him and his learning. A stark comparison to the tutoring session a few weeks earlier where I had felt like an imposter.

A past Thursday afternoon in the hospital classroom, I had been working with a high school student on pre-algebra. We had fun graphing polynomials to see how they shifted with different changes to the equations, but soon enough came to a new section where we encountered a problem that this student didn’t know how to solve. I pick up the whiteboard marker to demonstrate how I would multiply the polynomials together and then suggest he graph it to see what it looked like. He graphs the solution I came to next to the original problem (the equation without multiplying together the terms) and… the curves don’t match.

On the outside, I’m cool. On the inside I feel crazy: “What did I do wrong!! I have a Bachelor’s degree in engineering and I can’t even multiply these polynomials together!? Did I just teach this completely wrong?” I motion to the teacher who had just gotten back from another student’s room, “Does this look right to you? Do you remember the rules for distributing these terms?” She looked at me and said, “Nope, sorry!” She starts talking to the student so that I at least have a moment to do a quick google search. When I find an example online and compare it to mine, I realize I did it right. I just dropped a negative, and in that moment I’m heartbroken. Not for the dropped negative, but for the speed with which I believed I had done it wrong—for how immediate my distrust was.

This semester, I took a machine learning class, and who I walked into the room as on the first day of class was much the same person who immediately doubted them self that day at the hospital. I wasn’t sure what I had gotten myself into and I certainly was convinced that the other people in the room were better off than I was. And yet, the ground I have taken in this semester by putting myself into that (seemingly risky) environment has paid off! (Spoiler alert: I loved the class and am SUCH a nerd for machine learning and artificial intelligence).

What I’m learning, and sharing here in writing this, is that:

  1. I’m not alone in being intimidated or nervous by math sometimes. The more I open up to others about where I get stopped or confronted, the more connected I am to the universality of certain experience. Imposter syndrome is rampant.
  2. My willingness to step outside of my comfort zone is what brings me the most joy. It is also where I can make the biggest difference in contributing to others learning.
  3. I love math, and I had been unwilling to claim that before. Owning this unapologetically doesn’t even mean I need to be perfect at it!

So what can we do to inspire the next generation of STEM students + pioneers to discover their love of math and their confidence in themselves? Doesn’t everyone deserve the chance to love math!?!?

Now excuse me while I go help my husband as he’s studying to take a math placement exam… (no really, he is!)

*name changed for confidentiality

3 Finals Week Study Hacks from a Lifelong Learner

In honor of the brief respite of UW-Madison’s study day—the calm before the storm that is finals week—I’m putting pen-to-paper, so to speak, on some study hacks I have developed in my 5+ years in higher education studying engineering. My goal is to leave you with (at the very least) one thing you can implement this week to bring some confidence, ease, or clarity.

1. Get the big picture

Each finals week I start with the big picture. I sit down, usually with a blank piece of paper and a sharpie and a black pen (although this time I did it with a handy white board) and draw out a timeline. I start from today and draw it out to the end of finals or the day of my last exam or due date. I add in all the key deliverables for each of my classes to the timeline, and leave a list of “other” items at the bottom that don’t quite fit on the timeline clearly. I use this to house only hard deadlines, not the milestones I’ve made up for myself about writing or studying, just the hard stops and due dates.

Fall 2019 finals week overview/timeline–let’s do this!

Now you have your path. You know how long the week will be—it’s just a week. It’s finite. It’ll end, soon enough. You also now have a picture of the distribution of your work so you can start setting priorities for each day.

2. Put it in reality

Now that you have a sense of the big picture, you need to step down to the step-by-step, daily living of the larger timeline you drew out. How will the work actually get done? When will you do it? Where will you do it? Do you need to coordinate with anyone else?

You can do this in many ways, but start by moving backwards from the due date or final. For example, I’ve drawn out a timeline for a paper that is due next Wednesday. I know that if I’ve turned it in on Wednesday, I’ve probably done final edits the day of or day before (so let’s pick the day before to give some extra room), which means I wrote the final results section the day before that. I know already that I won’t work on this paper on Sunday since I am walking at graduation or tomorrow since I have an exam and presentation and a few meetings. So I keep stepping backward to what I would accomplish today.

My 705 research paper plan.

I might not do all this work for something that is less complex, say for an exam which I will just know that I need to block 3 hours to study for. Use your discretion and trust your gut, you know what works.

Now the real trick is to not leave it on the whiteboard or piece of paper, but to put it in reality next. Block off the time in your calendar and re-arrange the less urgent items around it. Text the people you need to coordinate with, and if you don’t hear back, but a note in your calendar to follow-up. Fool proof your plan in reality!

Other tips:

  • If you’re having trouble focusing, set 2 or 3 goals for the day, total. Stick to those and only those.
  • Start with the hardest thing, the thing you have been procrastinating on the longest. Even if it isn’t THE most important, having it complete may give you the boost you need to do the other things with alacrity.

3. First comes first: you

Now that you’ve done a lot of thinking about what you need to do (and when, and how, and with whom), give yourself the moment to think about what you want to do. Is there a way you can schedule in a bit of “me” time? Can you create breaks that are actual breaks that fulfill you, bring you joy, give you rest, move you forward on something else you’re working on? Put those in the calendar or on a list in front of you so that you can take them when you need.

A few examples of breaks I have taken:

  • A warm bath reading Ray Kurzweil’s book, How to Create a Mind.
  • Spending time with my pet rats and/or cats.
  • Perusing LinkedIn for interesting articles or new possible connections (or the chance to re-connect with someone I’ve known before). This can be an especially useful way to spend your time, paying off down the road in meaningful connections.
  • Simply switching gears to a different project—maybe the break I need from writing is just to look at a spreadsheet and do the mind-numbing task I can’t usually get myself to do. Putting those next to each other as I plan my day may be advantageous.
  • Going out to dinner with my family.
  • Seeing my therapist.
  • Cleaning the kitchen and listening to the news or my favorite podcast, 99 Percent Invisible.

I’ve been a student for what feels like forever and will be a student for what some people would call forever. If I’ve learned anything along the way, it’s that you won’t always remember the grade you got on that exam or paper, but you will remember the people you studied with, learned from—whose company you enjoyed—and who you got to be in the process.

Build those moments to reflect on what you have accomplished this semester and celebrate yourself and your friends/colleagues into your week as you tackle finals! Good luck!

3 Things to know about Human Factors Engineering: Starting with what the heck is it?

Most of the time when I tell people I’m studying Human Factors Engineering, I get a blank stare or an “oh, so you mean the human side of engineering!” I respond with “Kind of!” and launch into my elevator pitch on what Human Factors Engineering (HFE) is…

“It was formerly called Engineering Psychology,” I say, “It’s actually synonymous with the term ergonomics. We often only think about physical ergonomics—take for example that chair. Someone designed it, chose who fit in it, who didn’t fit in it, influencing how we interact with it, etc. We can also think about cognitive and social/organizational ergonomics as we design products, interfaces, systems, and even jobs.” Cue more confusion on the face of whomever unknowingly prompted my tangent.

Since sometimes us HFE folk have a hard time describing our field in a few sentences, I’ve decided to write this post covering 3 things you didn’t know about Human Factors Engineering (HFE). We will start, quite naturally, with answering the question “what the heck is HFE?”

Thing 1: What is HFE?

The International Ergonomics Association defines ergonomics (human factors) as follows:

Ergonomics (or human factors) is the scientific discipline concerned with the understanding of interactions among humans and other elements of a system, and the profession that applies theory, principles, data and methods to design in order to optimize human well-being and overall system performance.

Practitioners of ergonomics and ergonomists contribute to the design and evaluation of tasks, jobs, products, environments and systems in order to make them compatible with the needs, abilities and limitations of people.


Ergonomics helps harmonize things that interact with people in terms of people’s needs, abilities and limitations.


International Ergonomics Association, “What is Ergonomics?”

As the IEA definition clarifies, the nature of HFE is that it is multi-disciplinary and applied, leaning heavily on design. It pulls ideas from many domains to create actionable insights that impact people’s ability to do their best work, safely and joyfully.

In Designing for People: An Introduction to Human Factors Engineering, the authors (including UW Professor John Lee) say that HFE “aims to make technology work for people” along three dimensions: safety, performance, and satisfaction. The value placed on each of those dimensions may vary greatly, as you could imagine, depending on the application. For example, we may focus more significantly on safety when we design a plane than when we are designing a word processing software where performance or productivity is the focus.

This visual, taken from Designing for People , represents the way our priorities may shift depending on the domain or work we are applying HFE to (found on page 4)

However, in any of these cases, HFE must keep all three goals in mind to produce effective solutions.

Thing 2: How do people use HFE?

HFE is field of diverse methods and applications used to achieve the three goals discussed above: safety, performance and satisfaction. Tools in the HFE toolbox include heuristics, usability study and design, process and workflow mapping, participatory and user-centered design, contextual inquiry and qualitative research methods, FMEA and other error-reduction strategies, and many, many more.  

A central tenant of HFE is systems thinking, or approaching problems with a wide view and attention to interaction, iteration, and emergence. HFE never blames a person for their error, but rather looks at what “perfect storm” of system qualities allowed for errors to occur.

As such, you can imagine that HFE is both used to study systems after something went wrong (a product of poor system design) or intervene before error occurs by designing for optimal human-system interaction.

An Example


After a long day of work, I walk to my car. My phone alerts me that I need to stop at the pharmacy on my way home to pick up my prescription. I hop in my car and start driving home, and next thing I know I’m parked in my driveway. Dang it! I meant to stop for my prescription.

This seemingly mundane example is showcasing a really awesome and challenging thing about our brains. On one hand, isn’t it convenient that you don’t have to think really hard about your drive home? On the other, your ability to follow your usual path meant you made an error this time. You weren’t able to divert from that path.

HFE would look at this example and say, how can we design the system to support my intent to stop at the pharmacy? Maybe we can create an alarm that will sound when if I make the turn away (towards home) from the pharmacy. Or plan to pick up my prescription at a time where I’m not doing such an ingrained task. Or maybe if there was a post it note on the dashboard, I would have remembered!

Now just imagine we are talking about a task that a surgeon does every day. How can we support them to do the tasks (which might be similarly ingrained), while preventing errors that might be the difference between life or death for their patients? This is where HFE gets really interesting.

Thing 3: Why is HFE important?

And for any of you who are still wondering why HFE would matter to you or your field, here’s the quick two-bullet summary:

  • HFE concepts apply to everything you do and all the things you interact with (e.g. your screen time, how safe our cars are, job motivation)
  • Understanding HFE concepts allow you to align the world to produce what you intend through thoughtful re-design (e.g. reorganizing your phone to produce a result of less screen time, designing cars so that they are less distracting to the driver, creating jobs that are challenging and engaging to employees)

In Summary

HFE is a discipline with the power to create a world that works for everyone. Luckily, every field could stand to evaluate its workability and take a systems approach to re-designing and developing itself actually produce its intended outcomes.

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Thanks for reading this far! Stay tuned for the next article in my series: Why Engineers are Essential to the Future of Health Care

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Are you an HFE researcher or practitioner? How to you describe what you do? Comment below or tweet at me  to start a conversation.

Inventing a New Future: I’m a PhD Student!

Hanna tweeting "Big news disguised in a brief email--I'm going to get my PhD!!!" and a screen shot of the acceptance email.

In honor of my recent acceptance into UW – Madison’s Industrial and Systems Engineering Department’s Doctor of Philosophy program, I’m embarking on writing a series of articles on Human Factors Engineering and its applications. My intention with this series is to share with you:

  • What Human Factors Engineering (HFE) is
  • The many ways HFE influences the world around us
  • How HFE can be leveraged to create safety, productivity, and joy
  • How HFE is being used in specific contexts, particularly health care
  • And more…

So stay tuned for more content from my brain! For now, I will leave you with my vision for the future.

PhD Application Personal Statement

Hanna Barton | September 14th, 2019

The future is calling for new and innovative health service design and delivery structures. Since the Institute of Medicine’s (IOM) landmark reports, To Err is Human and Crossing the Quality Chasm, were published in 2000 and 2001 the field of Health Systems Engineering has been growing. So much so, that the National Academy of Engineers (NAE) has come together with the IOM in Building a Better Delivery System with a charge to engineers to apply their time-honored tools to the behemoth struggles we face in healthcare.

I would like to answer that call. There is no better work for me to do with my life than to develop systems and structures that provide people with optimal health: ones that really work for people, with no one left out. Continuing on from my Master’s degree program to conduct research and earn a PhD here at the University of Wisconsin – Madison is the next step to prepare me to make this difference.

I became an engineer because I saw that, while noble to pursue knowledge for its own sake, I am driven to integrate it to make change, to build and to design with it. Through my Biomedical Engineering coursework, I fell in love with the design process—the way people of varied backgrounds and expertise could come together to create something that hasn’t existed before but exactly what’s required. By iterative design experience, I saw firsthand the value that team members, including myself, brought when we applied new mindsets to engineering design, be they public health or gender and women’s studies viewpoints. 

During my accelerated Master’s program, I’ve had the chance to take a cross-sectional view of healthcare, completing courses in the law and business schools this past semester. The luckiest moment of them all may have come, though, in an Industrial and Systems Engineering course when Dr. Nicole Werner approached me about working in her lab for the summer. My experience working with Dr. Werner inspired me to broaden my perception of what could be accomplished in academia. I am drawn to Werner lab because it runs the full continuum from conducting qualitative research (visiting and interviewing people and distinguishing emerging concepts from the transcripts), to theorizing and publishing about those concepts, to conducting participatory design sessions and developing design recommendations for assistive technology, to ultimately building, implementing, and testing those technologies.

My intention is that my research as a PhD student will bring together many of my passions and talents—including my 1) fascination with design, design thinking, and participatory design work, 2) commitment to serving historically marginalized or under-served communities, 3) love for inter-disciplinary, collaborative work, 4) focus on global perspectives and implications and 5) excitement about seeing projects realized and implemented in the world.

There is so much meaningful work to be done in healthcare (and in health and well-being more broadly) that will require a distinct mindset. And while health care providers are essential to health and wellness, a new kind of healthcare workforce is warranted—one of collaborative effort between experts in policy, data science, clinical care, and human factors and systems engineering. Human Factors engineering is uniquely situated to inform the design and implementation of systems and technologies that holistically support people’s truest intentions—leaving people healthier, happier, more satisfied and productive.

Why do I need a liberal arts education anyway?

The saying ‘knowledge is power’ is an old adage, that must transform into ‘critical thinking is power.’ Living in a day and age where anything you could want to learn is as close as a google search away, it becomes no longer a question of knowledge, but of understanding—of the way we view and interact with the world and the other people in it.

A liberal arts education seeks to expand our way of thinking about and understanding the world. It has its necessary components of learning concrete ‘knowledge,’ but where the true power of a liberal arts education is the opportunity to develop the ability to decipher fact from fiction, to acknowledge biases, to view life from another person’s eyes, and to collaborate across disciplines and backgrounds.

Inside of a commitment to ‘be the change you wish to see in the world,’ there is no room for the righteousness that is the human-trap of knowledge. We have to instead be open to being told we are wrong, that we have a skewed view, or that we may be missing the point. However, I don’t say that to mean we should give up on what we are committed to, it’s actually quite the opposite case. We have to be the courageous ones willing to put ourselves on the line for the things we care about.

As someone who has a liberal arts education with emphases on biomedical engineering and gender and women’s studies, it’s my job to put myself first into the intersection of these fields. Any fears I have yield to my conviction that the world needs the love and compassion I have to offer. Although, I’m not the first, nor the last to put myself into this arena. In this sense, it is silly to think that sitting back and waiting for someone to make the contribution or be the change I want to see in the world is a better plan of action. It is clear to me that the study of gender and women’s studies with no application to other fields is completely counter to the study of it at all. The concepts of sex and gender and sexuality can’t remain as academic definitions used only in feminist-based fields; they must be brought to historically sexist or divided fields. It’s in this melding of disciplines that we can make a difference for those who are historically left behind or disadvantaged.

An ethnic studies counseling psychology class I took in 2016 opened my eyes to all the ways my identity intersects—from the places I have privilege to the places I myself am disadvantaged. It gave me a chance to reflect on my identity in more ways than I had ever thought of it before—from my race, socioeconomic status, gender, sex, sexuality, education-level, and many more. More importantly, however, it gave me a chance to see where these intersect: where my status as a woman interacts with my male-dominated engineering education or where my whiteness affects the perspective I have on money. I had never had a place to see and acknowledge my biases and privilege so freely than in this class. By gaining an understanding of the perspective I naturally have on the world, I got that the world wasn’t necessarily that way or any one way at all. And if the world isn’t the one way I see it, I have more power to interact with people and see things from their perspective.

That is just one example of the contribution that I want to be in the world, but I see this all over my life. It’s in the kind of friend I am for people—the one that they can say anything to and be unconditionally accepted and loved—but mostly the one that stands for their greatness expressed in the world. It’s in the way I spend my time promoting innovation and entrepreneurship on campus through my networking and group work, but also in putting my ideas up for scrutiny by distinguished faculty and entrepreneurs. It’s in the way I am constantly looking for the connection and relation of one class’s concepts to another that is indicative of my well-rounded liberal arts education.

Without the support of gracious mentors on campus and a liberal arts perspective on education, I wouldn’t have developed into the critical thinking, passionate, and resilient change agent I am now. Through coursework, projects, and simple conversations, I have experienced the heartbreak of not achieving a goal and the wave of power and excitement that comes with finding a partner that is just as passionately invested in what I’m up to. The charge from Ghandi “be the change you wish to see in the world” is really the opportunity to play full out in your life, because why not?

“This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; the being a force of nature instead of a feverish clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy.

I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the whole community, and as long as I live it is a privilege to do for it whatever I can.

I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work the more I live. I rejoice in life for its own sake. Life is no “brief candle” for me. It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got hold of for the moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.”

George Bernard shaw

As one of my favorite quotes by George Bernard Shaw goes, my life isn’t just for me, and isn’t just for my comfort. It is the opportunity of a lifetime; the opportunity to be the possibility I see the world as—one of freedom, fulfillment, connection, and love. The realization of this future is grounded on the education of the citizens of our world in what it means to be human, as well as the realization of the power of understanding the world in a broader sense and creating their unique purpose and role in it.

[This essay was adapted from a version I wrote in February of 2017]