Leslie Kay named new Director of University of Chicago’s Institute for Mind and Biology
March 17, 2008
Leslie Kay, Associate Professor in Psychology, has been named Director of the Institute for Mind and Biology at the University of Chicago.
The Institute for Mind and Biology brings researchers together from a variety of disciplines to look at basic questions about the mind’s interaction with other body systems as well as to look at how social contexts influence health.
As Director, Kay succeeds Martha McClintock, the David Lee Shillinglaw Distinguished Service Professor in Psychology, Founding Director of the Institute.
Kay and her research team examine smell and how the body uses the sense. “The questions we address concern perception and meaning, using olfactory behavior and learning as a model system,” she said. Kay and colleagues have shown that activity from various areas of the brain strongly influence responses in the most peripheral structure of the olfactory system, the olfactory bulb. “This suggests that the personal and internal states of an animal influence sensory processing at a very early stage,” she said.
Kay received a B.A. in Liberal Arts from St. John’s College and a Ph.D. in Biophysics from the University of California, Berkeley. She joined the University of Chicago faculty in 2000 after doing post-doctoral work at California Institute of Technology.
