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Nikki Lee graduated from Cornell University in 2015 with degrees in Biology and English. It was at Cornell that she first began working with prairie voles, for her undergraduate honors thesis in the lab of Dr. Alex Ophir. She continued to work with prairie voles during her PhD, investigating the roles of reward and dopamine signaling in prairie vole peer relationships in the lab of Dr. Annaliese Beery at Smith College. She received her PhD in Neuroscience and Behavior from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 2021, after which she was a Consortium for Faculty Diversity Postdoctoral Fellow at Colgate University until 2022. She is currently an NSF Postdoctoral Fellow in the lab of Dr. Eileen Lacey at the University of California, Berkeley, where she is using an integrative approach to evaluate the neuroendocrine mechanisms underlying dispersal in colonial tuco-tucos. After completing her postdoc, Nikki will be Assistant Professor of Cognitive and Behavioral Science at Washington & Lee University. There she plans to continue her work integrating investigation of neuroendocrine mechanisms with field work in wild Belding's ground squirrels and other non-model rodent species.