Although May spent her larval years dispersing throughout the globe, she finally settled on the west coast of the US in Santa Barbara, California, where she spent her juvenile years as a happy salty kid playing on the beach, surfing, and snorkeling. As an older juvenile, she attended the University of California at Davis where she got her BS in Biology with an emphasis on Marine Biology. There, she worked mostly with intertidal invertebrates of the Pacific Northwest both on campus and at the UCD Outpost of Science on the north coast of California, Bodega Marine Laboratory. After graduation, she settled at BML working as a research tech until she reverted back into a dispersal stage. And disperse she did to the southern hemisphere where she spent the better part of 3 years frolicking about.

May joined Dr. Berumen's Reef Ecology Lab in 2013 as a Master's student and worked on a variety of projects exploring connectivity, dispersal, biodiversity patterns, and the possible natural boundaries that occur in the Red Sea. She graduated in December 2014 and has been accepted as a PhD student at the University of California, Santa Cruz.