Cai attended the University of California, San Diego, where she received her Bachelor of Science in psychology in 2004. There, she performed an honors thesis under the mentorship of Ebbe Ebbesen entitled "Computational model of rape and assault cases." She continued her education at UCSD, pursuing her doctoral degree in Psychology and Behavioral Neuroscience, working with advisors Sara Mednick, Stephan Anagnostaras, and Michael Gorman.[1] Her graduate work focused on how sleep affects memory formation in humans and in mice. In humans, she found that rapid eye movement (REM) sleep facilitates creative thinking, compared to quiet rest and non-REM sleep.[2] Specifically, she found that REM sleep enhances the integration of unassociated memories and is associated with processes of abstraction and generalization that facilitate problem solving and discovery.[3]
In 2017, Cai became an assistant professor in the department of neuroscience at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. There, her research program centers on investigating memory formation.
