INDIANAPOLIS, IN – Mikayla Bisignani, a 2021 graduate of Johns Hopkins, has been named a Top 30 honoree for the 2021 NCAA Woman of the Year Award. Bisignani, a member of both the swimming and outdoor track & field teams, is the second Hopkins student-athlete to be honored as a Top 30 selection, joining 2015 graduate Ana Bogdanovski.
 
Established in 1991, the NCAA Woman of the Year award is rooted in Title IX and recognizes graduating female college athletes who have exhausted their NCAA eligibility and distinguished themselves in academics, athletics, service and leadership throughout their collegiate careers.
 
Selected from 535 school nominees — a group that was then narrowed to 154 nominees by conference offices — the Top 30 honorees include 10 from each of the three NCAA divisions. All have demonstrated excellence in academics, athletics, community service and leadership. The honorees represent 12 sports and an array of academic majors, including biology, psychology, mechanical engineering, education, software engineering and anthropology.
 
"We are thrilled to recognize the 30 honorees selected this year," said John Kietzmann, chair of the selection committee and associate director of athletics for marketing at Metropolitan State University of Denver. "These women excelled in the classroom and competition, while still prioritizing serving their peers and communities despite the challenges they faced during the pandemic. They represent the thousands of women competing in college sports each year, and we congratulate them for their incredible achievements."
 
Bisignani graduated in May with degrees in psychology and molecular and cellular biology and boasted a 3.99 cumulative GPA. This past summer, she did an independent research project in the Duvvuri Lab at the University of Pittsburg Medical Center and is currently attending medical school at Pitt. She was a three-time NCAA qualifier in swimming and was named the 2019 NCAA Elite 90 Award winner. Bisignani was a three-time First Team CoSIDA Academic All-American and the 2021 CoSIDA At-Large Academic All-American of the Year. She was also a member of the Johns Hopkins Outdoor Track & Field Team and was named the 2020 Centennial Conference (CC) Scholar-Athlete of the Year. 
 
Bisignani earned All-America honors twice in swimming and was on the 200 Free Relay team that finished fourth at the 2019 NCAA Championships. She qualified for the 2020 NCAA Championships that were cancelled and the 2021 championships were not held due to the COVID-19 pandemic. As a member of the track team, she was a two-time Centennial Conference Champion in the discus and placed 13^th at the event at the 2019 NCAA Championships.
 
Bisignani was a member of the JHU Student-Athlete Advisory Committee, the Women's Pre-Health Leadership Society and was vice-president of the Hopkins Undergraduate Bioethics Society. She was the co-founder and lead mentor for the Pre-Health Student Advisory Board. In addition, Bisignani was a project lead for Enactus, a global organization that addresses social issues through entrepreneurial action. She also served as a mentor to two freshmen student-athletes through Blue Jays LEAD. In May she was presented with the Robert H. Scott Award for excellence in athletics, scholarship and extracurricular participation as well as the Howard-Shriver Award, for excellence in athletics and scholarship at Johns Hopkins.
 
Bisignani was a research assistant in the JHU Laboratory for Child Development as well as the Neuroendocrinology Lab at Saint Vincent College. In addition, she spent the summer of 2017 as an intern at Latrobe Hospital. She worked in the front office of the JHU Athletic Department as well as on the game day operations crew. Bisignani was a tutor with the JHU Center for Student Success as well as at Waverly Elementary School. In addition, she was a volunteer care-giver for a patient with multiple sclerosis and volunteers at Mercy Medical Center in the ER and Get-Well Network.
 
The selection committee will determine the top three honorees in each division from the Top 30, and the nine finalists will be announced this fall. From those nine finalists, the NCAA Committee on Women's Athletics will choose the 2021 NCAA Woman of the Year.
 
On Tuesday, Nov. 9, during a virtual awards ceremony, the Top 30 honorees will be celebrated, and the NCAA Woman of the Year will be named.