HIDDEN GEMS: Emma McDowell's Versatility Becomes A Game-Changer, On & Off The Ice

Written by Nicolas Notarangelo '24
- ECGulls.com Intern

There are far more hidden gems than shining stars in team sports. While praise and recognition almost always gravitate towards the student-athletes who receive the most playing time, those who truly understand team sports know that student-athletes don't need to be on the field, court, ice, or competitive surface in order to make an impact on the game. Team success is dependent upon the sum of its parts — not the contributions of a few individuals. The goal of this column, Hidden Gems, is to tell the stories of Endicott student-athletes who may not receive the most playing time, but who are still outstanding and exemplary in their own right. They're the student-athletes who shine in the shadows and find their fulfillment in team success. These student-athletes are the hidden gems of Endicott Athletics.

BEVERLY, Mass. – Throughout her career with the Endicott women's ice hockey program, Emma McDowell (Alexandria, Va.) was as versatile as they come. She was never the main superstar on the team, but she fit the unsung hero role to a tee, whether she was playing center or wing, McDowell found a way to adapt and help the team. 

Now, she is using those same skills to affect lives around the world, this time, as a systems engineer at Moderna. 

The company, which was founded in 2010, is known by many as one of the three major pharmaceutical companies to have developed an effective COVID-19 vaccine.

McDowell's position, which she started in October 2020, is equally as important to the fight against the pandemic as ever.

Her day-to-day job functions include the following duties:

• Handles a continuous monitoring system for Moderna's lab freezers, humidity chambers, and incubators.  

• Puts together temperature sensors, sets up alarm notifications for freezers that send emails to her when they get too warm, and creates dashboards for users to watch their units. 

• Creates and edits unit operations that log data and buffers recipes for scientists and process engineers to use. (The unit operations pay attention to materials, equipment, data, and calculations from any experiments and the recipes help calculate how much of each chemical to add when making a specific solvent)

• Installs and maps a data management system to the lab instruments, so none of the run data gets lost. 

As confusing as that all may sound to a non-bioengineering major, McDowell makes it look and sound so easy.

Like when she described some of her job tasks in further detail.

"I've been creating and editing a ton of new unit operations for our scientists and engineers to test and study our products," she said. "I've also been working with our informatics team to create new unit op features for different types of data."

PLAYING HOCKEY TRANSLATES TO OFF-ICE SUCCESS

With all these newfound responsibilities, McDowell was quick to credit her hockey background and its influence on her success at Moderna. 

"One characteristic that has translated from the ice to my job is holding myself accountable as a team member," she said. "I am the only person in my position, so my teammates are relying on me to put in the work and effort. I am always working to improve my work to help make my teammates' lives easier." 

While Emma's impact didn't consistently show up on the stat sheet, her presence in itself was an insurmountable difference-maker.

Just ask women's ice hockey head coach Andrew McPhee. 

"Emma was a hard-working student-athlete on and off the ice. She helped set a standard for what is expected off the ice, arriving early to the rink to bike or warm up her hands. She was one of the best conditioned and fit student-athletes," said McPhee. "On the ice, Emma could fill different roles in the lineup as a wing or center and she played with energy. She was always putting the work in to improve and would be one of the last players to leave the ice at the end of practice. She was committed to her studies and her teammates, and played a big part in our success."

One of her friends and former women's ice hockey teammates, Jillian Gibbs (Burlington, Vt.), also concurred with Coach McPhee on McDowell's work ethic and leadership qualities. 

"She was always putting in the hard work. On the ice, she was always that person who put her head down and worked as hard as she could," said Gibbs. "Off the ice, she was always a good teammate, brought all of that fun energy, always wanted everyone to hang out. She tried to bring people together and create a fun atmosphere for everyone to be around." 

That success for the women's ice hockey program, which Coach McPhee vaguely referenced, includes an eye-popping 85-17-7 (.812) overall record and 44-5-3 (.875) conference mark during McDowell's four years with the program (2016-20). 

During that span, the Gulls won two Colonial Hockey Conference (CHC) titles, went a whole season undefeated in conference play (16-0-0), compiled a program-record 25 wins in her senior season, among many other highlights.

McDowell played in 66 games during that stretch, recording two goals, five assists, and seven points (one game-winning goal); however, as Coach McPhee alluded to before, McDowell's stats aren't what's most important in this discussion – it's one of the standards which she helped set for the program, which is to win championships.

The other? 

To excel even more so in the classroom, which McDowell certainly did.

She was a two-time CHC Academic All-Conference selection and also earned American Hockey Coaches Association (AHCA) All-America Scholar honors her senior year too.

As a team, during her four-year career, the Gulls led the CHC for the most Academic All-Conference honorees in three of the four years (69 total student-athletes honored) and saw 44 student-athletes named AHCA All-America scholars.

ENDICOTT EXPERIENCE

During her undergraduate career, McDowell also interned at Genomic Expression Inc. and Active Genomes Expressed Diagnostics (AGED) gaining valuable experience in a variety of areas such as RNA-sequencing, scientific research (gene-fusions, gene-targeting, PTLD, R and Python programming, viral oncogenes), market research, and presentation and interviewing skills, among others.

McDowell interned for 440-plus hours at Genomic Expression Inc., which is located in Beverly, for her semester-long internship and another 120+ hours at AGED, located in Washington, D.C., as part of her education in Endicott's internship program. 

Those experiential outcomes eventually led to a process development associate position with the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard from June 2020-October 2020 where she was responsible for being part of the diagnostic COVID-19 testing team, working in a BL2+ lab space.

The Broad Institute may sound familiar to Gulls reading this as it is the processing center used by the College for COVID-19 testing.

Meanwhile, her additional duties with the Broad Institute included processing human samples through a high throughput DNA sequencing and genotyping laboratory, data validation, and quality reporting. RNA extraction, and more.

"Bioengineering is a very broad field," said McDowell. "Endicott helped me find a niche within the field through my classes and internships. When I graduated from Endicott, I wouldn't have been able to tell you what a systems engineer does, but everything I do at work has translated from what I did in school – including configuring sensors, using lab equipment from biomaterials class, and figuring out new bioinformatics tools."

As for what's next for McDowell, that remains to be seen, but whatever it is, she will more than likely play an important under-the-radar role in a big-picture goal.

That seems to be the pattern for the versatile alum. 

For the latest on Endicott Athletics, follow the Gulls on social media on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube.

(Photo Credit - David Le '10)