Emma Breen is finishing her grasp’s in trumpet efficiency and getting ready to proceed her research at UCLA this fall as a doctoral scholar. She has additionally staked out terrain on the planet of science, a ardour she holds equally with music and plans to proceed.
2023 Graduate Pupil Graduation Speaker Emma Breen
“It’s important to be versatile,” stated Breen, reflecting on her selections to pursue a number of paths. “And UCLA is a superb place to organize for a profession within the twenty-first century.”
The 2023 Graduate Pupil Graduation Speaker got here to UCLA very consciously. She selected UCLA over the Royal Academy of Music, each as a result of she wished to work with trumpet professor Jens Lindemann, and since UCLA supplied a unique type of training.
“The Royal Academy is rather more conventional of their strategy,” stated Breen. “I felt like UCLA would give me alternatives to do different fascinating issues, and that was nice. I used to be additionally lucky to obtain a Mimi Alpert Basis Scholarship, which actually made it attainable to return to LA.”
Breen has amassed fairly the report whereas doing her graduate work at UCLA. She was chosen to play with the Disney All-American School Band. She received the principal trumpet place within the American Youth Symphony. She is an energetic session recorder and has carried out throughout america.
“There are quite a lot of alternatives for musicians in Los Angeles,” stated Breen. “It’s important to preserve your eyes open and be energetic. It may be an amazing place to work.”
Prepping for a gig this Could at The Catalina Jazz Membership
Breen has jumped with each ft into the lifetime of an expert musician. Along with recitals and performances with ensembles at UCLA, her most up-to-date session work contains recording for Unicorn, a forthcoming animated sequence on HBO by the director of The PowerPuff Women. That in flip led to an invite to play at Comedian-Con in San Diego this summer time. And all of this got here on high of being ready of management with American Youth Symphony (AYS).
“It’s a lot work,” stated Breen. “I bought the latest music for AYS when the trumpet studio was in Boulder, Colorado for the nationwide trumpet competitors. And I sat within the resort room, wanting on the materials, I believed to myself, ‘That is an excessive amount of. I’m going to need to stop trumpet.’”
However then Breen set to work, discovering that she was able to studying the music and sustaining her demanding schedule. She credit the welcoming tradition of the AYS.
“A lot of the different musicians are just a little older than I’m, and so they have extra expertise,” stated Breen. “However they welcomed me proper in and so they’ve been so supportive. It’s actually made all of the distinction.”
Then there’s Breen’s scientific work. Breen doesn’t have an undergraduate background in science, however she has labored in a lab ever since highschool. As an undergraduate at Northwestern College, she was a part of the college’s famed Pinkett Lab in addition to the SONIC/ATLAS lab, collaborating with NASA’s long-range house missions by conducting cognitive analysis in each Russian and English.
Straight from the Laboratory
How Breen ended up with 4 years of lab expertise—and not using a single undergraduate science class—is a narrative we’ve coated earlier than, and price studying. However it was not simply an undergraduate job. Breen at the moment conducts stem-cell analysis on the Zamudio Lab inside UCLA’s Division of Molecular Cell Developmental Biology.
“Science is vital to me,” stated Breen. “It feeds part of me that music doesn’t. And I don’t see a necessity to select between the 2. I do know that typically folks suppose in case you aren’t laser-focused on one factor you possibly can’t do it properly. However I disagree.”