Leslie Kay

Leslie Kay is a Professor in the Department of Psychology at The University of Chicago, affiliated with The College. She serves as Principal Investigator (PI) and is part of key committees including the Committee on Computational Neuroscience and Committee on Neurobiology. Her research focuses on olfactory and limbic system neurophysiology, examining oscillatory cooperativity mechanisms and how contextual factors influence sensory processing.

Education: BA in Liberal Arts from St. John's College (Santa Fe, NM), PhD in Biophysics from UC Berkeley (1995). Postdoctoral training under Gilles Laurent at Caltech investigated mitral cell responses in olfactory bulb circuits. Professional history includes roles at Los Alamos National Laboratory (GenBank project) and business analytics roles in the 1980s.

Research emphasizes understanding how stimulus context modulates sensory perception and neural processing across brain regions. Active in interdisciplinary initiatives like the Masters in Computational Social Science program.