In 1927, after receiving a Whitney Fellowship and a Bartol Scholarship, she enrolled in astronomy at Radcliffe College (now part of Harvard).

"[2] Emma received her PhD in astronomy from Harvard College in 1930 for her dissertation titled, A Spectrophotometric Study of A Stars.

[They were] studying stellar parallaxes by applying trigonometric functions to observations made on multiple photographic exposures.

[1]She worked at the observatory "for more than a dozen years" before the university promoted her to professor in 1945, but by then she had taken a medical leave of absence after contracting a debilitating illness, Malta Fever, which restricted her activities.

[1] Emma Williams married the Russian-born astronomer Alexander N. Vyssotsky in 1929; they published jointly and worked together at the McCormick Observatory in Charlottesville, Virginia.