Members
Leslie M. Kay
Director of the Institute for Mind and Biology
Associate Professor Department of Psychology and The College
Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley, 1995
Field Specialties:
Behavioral Neurophysiology, Neurobiology, Computational Neuroscience
Contact Information
Phone: (773) 702-6174
Fax: (773) 702-6898
LKay@uchicago.edu
Institute for Mind and Biology
940 E. 57th Street
Chicago, IL 60637
Areas of Research
Leslie M. Kay is an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology and The College at the University of Chicago. She is currently the director of the Institute for Mind and Biology. She received her PhD in Biophysics from UC Berkeley in 1995. Dr. Kay was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Biology at the California Institute of Technology (1995-2000).
The Kay laboratory uses behavioral neurophysiology to examine how context, perceptual history, learning and physiological state interact within the brain during sensory perception. The lab studies the physiology of sensory and perceptual processing and learning in the olfactory and limbic systems, using laboratory rats and mice, with several behavioral paradigms designed to uncover different behavioral and cognitive states. Recording and analytical techniques span several scales, from the single neuron, to small populations, large populations, and distributed systems of cortical and subcortical regions. Theoretical interpretations are aimed at understanding system level dynamics and pathology and at examining neural coding hypotheses using the framework of complex dynamical systems.
