May received her bachelor's degree in Atmospheric Sounding from the Department of Atmospheric Physics, Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology (NUIST), China in June 2017. Then she went to the University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH) for doctoral studies. She got her PhD in December 2022, and her doctoral research focused on the impacts of wildfires on air quality using satellite, model, and ground measurements. She joined the AER Lab in January 2023 as a postdoc.