Senator Rachel May

Rachel May, Senator-elect in New York's 53rd District, lives in Syracuse. She is a lifelong educator who has worked for the last fifteen years in the area of environmental sustainability at Syracuse University and SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry. She has also been deeply involved in the local community, including serving on the Board of the Onondaga County Resource Recovery Agency and the Syracuse Board of Zoning Appeals. In partnership with Native American educators, she secured grants from the EPA and the National Endowment for the Humanities to develop teaching materials and train teachers and students about the extraordinary environmental and human history of Onondaga Lake. Before moving to Syracuse, Rachel had a successful career as a professor of Russian language and literature, first at Stony Brook and then at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota. She earned a Master’s degree from Oxford University on a Marshall Scholarship and a Ph.D. in Russian language and literature from Stanford University. In 2001 she and her husband chose to settle in Syracuse, where he is a professor at Le Moyne College. Their daughter graduated from Nottingham HS in Syracuse and is now enrolled at Cornell University.