Rajyashree Sen
Bio
(Perfomer)Rajyashree Sen, a.k.a Rai (like “rye”), hails from Kolkata, India. She has been improvising from the moment she was born, and after she dies, her epitaph will read: “Never had a plan, and still don’t” in her favorite font (which is Monospace). Rai has studied improv at Washington Improv Theater, iO Chicago, Upright Citizen’s Brigade, and Magnet Theater. When not improvising, Rai is most likely to be found in her other natural habitat: a neuroscience lab at Columbia University, where she is a postdoc. As a neuroscientist, Rai currently studies mouse memories in mouse brains - how they form, how they change, and how they disappear. During her PhD, she studied fly brains. Her research focused on a set of neurons, dubbed the “moonwalker neurons”, that make flies walk backwards. (Her moonwalking flies were once tweeted by MC Hammer, which is the one fact in her life that she’s taking to afterlife). While science has taken her to interesting places in interesting brains, improv has taken her to the moon, hell, back, and beyond.
