A trio of first-time honorees represented MIT on the Capital One Academic All-America Division III Women’s At-Large team as announced by the College Sports Information Directors of America on Tuesday. Recently graduated senior Caitlin Mackey and junior Margaret Guo were voted to the first team while junior Sarah Wright secured a spot on the second team. MIT is the all-time Division III leader in producing Academic All-Americas and currently ranks third across all NCAA Divisions with 227 honorees.
Sports eligible for the at-large program are: women’s bowling, women’s crew, men’s and women’s fencing, field hockey, men’s and women’s golf, men’s and women’s gymnastics, men’s and women’s ice hockey, men’s and women’s lacrosse, men’s and women’s rifle, men’s and women’s skiing, men’s and women’s swimming and diving, men’s and women’s tennis, men’s volleyball, men’s and women’s water polo, and wrestling.
MIT Field Hockey was represented on the list for the fifth year in a row as Mackey claimed the program’s 10th award. A co-captain this past season, she ranked fifth in the New England Women’s and Men’s Athletic Conference (NEWMAC) in assists (10) and was second on the team in points (22) and third in goals (6). Mackey’s performances resulted in her being placed on the National Field Hockey Coaches Association (NFHCA) New England East all-region second team and NEWMAC all-conference first team. In addition, she is a three-time NFHCA Scholar of Distinction, NFHCA National Academic Squad and NEWMAC Academic All-Conference qualifier. The outgoing Alpha Chi Omega chapter president, Mackey was a member of the MIT Presidential Advisory Cabinet, the Tau Beta Pi Engineering Society, and the Pi Tau Sigma Mechanical Engineering Honor Society. Graduating with a degree in mechanical engineering, Mackey will now be working for SpaceX.
A member of MIT Women’s Swimming and Diving team, Guo becomes just the second swimmer in program history to receive this award as Yvonne Grierson ’90 first accomplished this feat in 1990. In addition, this is the Engineers’ first nod since national-champion diver Doria Holbrook ’08 collected this accolade three years in a row. At the 2015 NEWMAC Championship, Guo contributed to victories in the 200 yard medley and 400 yard medley relays. She went on to help MIT place 10th in the 200 yard medley relay at the NCAA Championship, resulting in All-America honorable mention honors. Guo was the recipient of the NCAA Elite 89 Award, which recognizes the student-athlete with the highest GPA at the site of the national championship. A two-time NEWMAC Academic All-Conference award winner, she is majoring in electrical engineering and computer science. Guo has been an intern with Medtronic, where she concentrated on designing a data mining code for efficient collection and study of bradycardia pacemaker patient data, while conducting analysis on cardiac data of over 6,000 patients. She also presented recommendations for future pacemaker development. A General Electric Women's Network Scholarship recipient, Guo is a department liaison for the Society of Women Engineers, a Sloan Business Club board member, and the vice-president and treasurer of MIT IEEE/ACM.
Wright is just the second student-athlete in the history of the MIT Rifle program to collect Academic All-America honors as she joins Clifford Eskey ’85 on the list. One of the top overall shooters in the Mid-Atlantic Conference (MAC), she paced the Engineers in smallbore, and her average score in air rifle was second on the squad. A first-team all-conference pick in both disciplines, Wright captured the MAC smallbore title this past season. Majoring in biological engineering, she has researched computational methods to model metabolism of antibiotic resistant bacteria at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard and is an undergraduate research fellow working on anti-influenza antibodies. Wright is also a Singapore-MIT Undergraduate Research Fellow and a member of Alpha Chi Omega.
