Professor Leslie Kay to Serve as Deputy Dean

Leslie Kay, Professor in the Department of Psychology, will serve as a deputy dean for the Division of the Social Sciences. In this role, Kay will lead the review of and strategic planning for the Division's research infrastructure, broadly construed.  She will also have input into broader divisional projects and policies. 

Kay is a behavioral neuroscientist whose work spans the fields of computational neuroscience, neurobiology, and psychology and focuses on contextual effects on early sensory processing. Leslie joined the Psychology faculty at the University of Chicago in 2000. She served as the Director of the Institute for Mind and Biology 2008-2014. Prior to joining UChicago, Kay did her postdoctoral work at Caltech in Neurobiology, graduate studies at UC Berkeley in Biophysics and an undergraduate degree in Liberal Arts at St. John’s College in Santa Fe. 

As announced by Amanda Woodward, Dean and Williams S. Gray Distinguished Service Professor on March 30, 2022, Kay’s term will begin on September 1, 2022. She will join Robert Vargas and Mark Hansen as a deputy dean in the Division. Vargas’ portfolio focuses on graduate education, and he works with students, departments, the dean of students' team, and broader partners across campus to strengthen and sustain graduate programs in SSD. Hansen will continue his role as Executive Director of MA Programs in the Social Sciences and faculty director of the MAPSS Program.