STANFORD, Calif. – Junior attacker Michelle Xiao was named a CoSIDA first-team Academic All-American, as announced Thursday by the organization.
Xiao joins Teresa Noyola, Christen Press and Kelley O'Hara as the program's only CoSIDA first-teamers, and is the 12th player overall to earn academic All-America recognition. Stanford has had at least one player named Academic All-America in eight of the past nine seasons.
A biomechanical engineering major who hails from Omaha, Nebraska, Xiao owns a cumulative 4.05 GPA and was recently named Pac-12 All-Academic first team. Along with redshirt junior goalkeeper Alison Jahansouz, Xiao was named to the CoSIDA Academic All-District 8 first team. A member of the All-Pac-12 second team, Xiao pitched in eight goals and six assists in 18 appearances before a season-ending injury against Florida State in the NCAA third round.
Xiao heavily involves herself in clinical research on Stanford's campus. As a part of the Stanford Bio-X USRP program, she worked in the Stanford Soft Tissue Biomechanics Lab (STBL) analyzing MRI of knee cartilage to detect early osteoarthritic changes.
During the summer of 2016, she spent time in the medicinal chemistry research lab at the University of Nebraska Medical Center working on synthesizing small molecules that could treat Alzheimer's Disease. She also published a paper from this research in the Bioorganic and Medicinal Chemistry Letters Journal titled "Design and Synthesis of New Piperidone Grafted Acetylcholinesterase".