Dr. Kay Tye
Professor & Wylie Vale Chair Systems Neurobiology Laboratory, Salk Institute for Biological Studies
Postdoctoral Fellow Stanford University
PhD in Neuroscience University of California, San Francisco
Growing up, Dr. Kay Tye did not want to be a scientist. In youthful rebellion against her biochemist mother and theoretical physicist father, Kay was drawn instead toward English literature. However, even then, her fascination with literary characters and why they behaved the way they did may have foreshadowed her future as a preeminent neuroscientist. Today, as the Wylie Vale Chair of Systems Neurobiology at the Salk Institute, she and her lab are trying to understand the emotional and motivational states that drive the behavior of real-life characters like us.
It was in her first psychology course as an undergraduate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that Kay’s interest in English literature began to shift in a more scientific direction. When the uncertainty underlying many psychological theories left her feeling unsatisfied, she became especially drawn to a more mechanistic, neurobiological approach to understanding the mind. This interest was solidified when she had the opportunity to meet Henry Molaison - aka Patient H.M., whose loss of his medial temporal lobe famously left him unable to form new memories - while at MIT. Experiencing first-hand that he had no idea who she was just minutes after meeting her made the connection between mind and brain palpable.
Yet even then, Kay was not certain that she wanted to be a neuroscientist. After having undergraduate research experiences that were “mixed at best”, she decided to defer her acceptance to graduate school and instead spent a year backpacking across Australia and working as a yoga instructor. When she eventually returned to the academic lifestyle as a Neurosciences PhD student at the University of California, San Francisco, she found the transition extremely jarring. She describes her first year of graduate school as an incredibly difficult time during which she was intimidated by her peers and struggled to find a lab. She was even seriously considering dropping out before she eventually found a home in the lab of Dr. Patricia Janak. In Dr. Janak, she found a mentor who was nurturing and supportive, but also gave her the independence and freedom to explore things she was curious about and discover her knack for research. With Dr. Janak’s mentorship and in such a positive environment, Kay began to thrive and, for the first time, to seriously consider a career in research. One pivotal moment she remembers was listening to the “crackle-pop” of neurons firing in an awake animal and hearing their activity change as the animal learned a task for the first time. Meanwhile, her confidence also began to grow. After giving her first research talk at a Gordon Research Conference, the encouragement and validation she received from her colleagues provided another significant boost to her ever-growing conviction to become an academic neuroscientist. From that time forward, even if she wasn’t sure whether she would “make it” in academia, she knew she wanted to try.
Fast-forward to present-day, where Kay is a full professor and endowed chair at the Salk Institute and at the top of her field in systems neurobiology. During her career, she has focused on studying the neural circuits underlying motivated behaviors. She is especially well known for her work dissecting the circuitry of the amygdala that encodes positive versus negative stimuli and for pioneering the use of optogenetics to understand how projection-specific populations of neurons can serve unique functions. More recently, she has expanded her research program to include how social factors affect motivated behaviors and how the brain maintains and encodes social homeostasis.
On top of being an exceptional scientist, Kay is also a devoted mentor who takes her role as a laboratory leader seriously. Her lab website is noteworthy for its inclusion of her detailed science and mentoring philosophy, where she lays out her expectations for her lab members, her collaborators, and herself. In it, she sets out her vision of a fun, inviting, and nurturing lab environment that is also highly productive and scientifically excellent. This philosophy is strongly influenced by different aspects of her own training experiences. For instance, she describes her time in grad school at UCSF as a “golden era” in which people were relaxed, open, non-competitive, and valued a good work-life balance while also being incredibly productive. As a postdoctoral fellow in Karl Deisseroth’s lab at Stanford, Kay especially valued the highly collaborative environment. Thus, in her own lab, she tries to foster a warm, collaborative culture, and she hopes that laying out these goals on her website for everyone to see will hold her accountable.
Kay has also been very vocal about the importance of acknowledging and addressing our implicit biases in science and fighting for systemic and cultural change. In between moving her lab from MIT to the Salk Institute in the winter of 2019, she wrote an extensive, well-sourced blog post about her experiences confronting her own implicit gender biases, even amidst facing challenges as a woman in science. Although she was nervous to put her thoughts and experiences out there in the open, she says that she felt compelled to speak out. “If I don’t talk about these really important issues, then whose responsibility is it to make change? If it’s not tenured professors, then who’s going to do it?”
Kay’s journey through neuroscience is one characterized by transformation and growth: from a literature-loving teen rebelling against her scientist parents, to a jaded college graduate and a first-year PhD student plagued with self-doubt, to finding her scientific voice in graduate school and becoming one of the most successful neuroscientists of her generation. And while continuing to conduct ground-breaking science, she is also using her position of influence to help spark important conversations that she hopes will help make science a more welcoming and equitable place. Needless to say, English literature’s loss was neuroscience’s gain.
Listen to Nancy’s full interview with Kay on August 6th, 2019 below!
