May Choi, MD, FRCPC

May Choi was born and raised in Alberta, Canada. While she was growing up, her late father was a rheumatologist who served as her inspiration and role model for doing science and medicine. She completed a Bachelor of Health Sciences degree with honors at the University of Calgary in 2010 and received her Doctorate of Medicine in 2014 at the University of Alberta.
 
Choi was touched by the impact her father had made on the lives of so many of his patients and the Canadian rheumatology community, so she decided to follow in his footsteps, completing both her internal medicine training in 2017 and rheumatology fellowship in June 2019 at University of Calgary’s Cumming School of Medicine. During her training, she developed a strong passion for systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) research under the mentorship of Drs. Marvin Fritzler, an international expert on autoantibodies, and Ann Clarke, an international expert in lupus. Her research accomplishments were recognized with several awards, including the Arthritis Research Canada/Lilly Early Rheumatology Researcher Scholarship in 2018 and 2019 and the Best Poster and Best Oral Presentation at Internal Medicine Research Day at the Cumming School of Medicine in 2016 and 2017.
 
For the last two years, with the support of the Gary S. Gilkeson Career Development Award from the Lupus Foundation of America, she has been training at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital under the supervision and mentoring of Dr. Karen Costenbader, a Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and lupus expert, and obtained a Master’s degree in Epidemiology Program at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Dr. Choi is now an Assistant Professor at the Cumming School of Medicine, the associate director of the Mitogen Advanced Diagnostics Laboratory and the associate director of the University of Calgary’s Lupus Centre of Excellence in Calgary. Her research laboratory is focused on biomarker discovery and validation for prediction of clinical outcomes in autoimmune rheumatic diseases including lupus, and the prevention of autoimmune disease development and disease-related complications.