Kay Tye

Biography

Tye was raised in Ithaca, New York, where both of her parents worked at Cornell University. Her parents had emigrated from Hong Kong; her father was a theoretical physicist and her mother a biochemist. As a girl, Tye worked in her mother's laboratory organizing pipette tips. She completed a Bachelor of Science with a major in cognitive science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) from 1999 to 2003. After graduating, she backpacked around Australia for a year before returning to the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), to study a PhD in neuroscience. She joined the laboratory of neurobiologist Patricia Janak and her thesis—which showed that neuronal activity was increased in the amygdala of rats learning to associate a stimulus with a reward—was published in Nature and won the Donald B. Lindsley Prize in Behavioral Neuroscience and the Harold M. Weintraub Graduate Student Award. She received her PhD in 2008 and worked as a post-doctoral research fellow at the UCSF Ernest Gallo Clinic and Research Center in 2008–2009 and at Stanford University from 2009 to 2011. At Stanford, she was mentored by Karl Deisseroth in optogenetics, a technique that uses light to activate or inhibit specific neurons.

Tye returned to MIT in 2012 as an assistant professor at the university's Picower Institute for Learning and Memory. Her research has focused on using optogenetics to identify and control connections in the brain that are linked to social behaviors such as reward-seeking and anxiety. In 2014, she was named on MIT Technology Review's TR35 list of the top innovators under 35 years old for her use of optogenetics in identifying neural circuits involved in anxiety and social interaction. She received the NIH Director's New Innovator Award in 2013 and the NARSAD Young Investigator Award in 2014.