Dr. Christina May earned her Bachelors of Science in Neuroscience from the University of Texas at Dallas, then joined the lab of Drs. Howard Becker and Tripp Griffin at the Medical University of South Carolina studying neural mechanisms of alcohol tolerance in mice. She received her Ph.D. in Neuroscience at the University of Michigan, where she worked in Dr. Monica Dus’s lab to study the consequences of a high-sugar diet on taste acuity and feeding behavior in fruit flies. She earned a Distinguished Dissertation Award for this work. Due to a long-held interest in space-related research, for her postdoctoral work, Dr. May decided to enter the field of navigational neuroscience to understand the computations underlying neural representations of external forces, like gravity. She is now a postdoctoral fellow in Dr. Katherine Nagel’s lab at NYU Langone, where she uses calcium imaging and computational and genetic techniques to probe the representation of the wind vector in the brains of flying fruit flies.
