Dr. Kay Tye earned her bachelors from MIT, majoring in brain and cognitive sciences, and her PhD for thesis work with Patricia Janak at the University of California San Francisco, focusing on how the amygdala undergoes plasticity for reward learning. She did her postdoctoral training with Karl Deisseroth at Stanford University, where she pioneered the use of projection-specific optogenetic manipulations, a mainstay of circuit neuroscience, and used this approach to dissect anxiety circuits in the amygdala. She started her own lab at MIT in 2012, investigating the neural circuit mechanisms of emotional valence. In 2017 she won the NIH Director’s Pioneer Award to study social homeostasis, a conceptual framework she formalized in 2019. Dr. Tye moved her lab to the Salk Institute in 2019 and became Wylie Chair Professor of the Systems Neurobiology Laboratory. In 2021 she became a Howard Hughs Medical Investigator and continues to investigate the neural bases of emotional valence and social homeostasis on the circuit and systems level.
Dr. Kay Tye
