Steve A. Kay is a British-born chronobiologist who mainly works in the United States. Dr. Kay has pioneered methods to monitor daily gene expression in real time and characterized circadian gene expression in plants, flies and mammals. In 2014, Steve Kay celebrated 25 years of successful chronobiology research at the Kaylab 25 Symposium, joined by over one hundred researchers with whom he had collaborated with or mentored. Dr. Kay, a member of the National Academy of Sciences, U.S.A., briefly served as president of The Scripps Research Institute. and is currently a professor at the University of Southern California. He also served on the Life Sciences jury for the Infosys Prize in 2011.
Life
Early life and influences Steve A. Kay was raised on the Isle of Jersey off the coast of Normandy. As a young child, he was fascinated by marine creatures exposed during low tide on Jersey island. His interest in biology deepened when an elementary teacher brought a microscope from mainland England into his small classroom. He spent hours looking through the microscope at swimming critters in pond water, amazed by "what was in pond water, or what the edges of a torn piece of paper looked like." By his early teens, Steve Kay knew that biology would be his lifelong passion and aimed to get a PhD. Years later, when his mother died of a progressive motor neuron disease in 2006, Steve Kay was motivated to study a mouse mutant he co-discovered that modeled the disease his mother had. Thus, a tribute to his mother has led to the discovery of the gene Listerin, Ltn1, E3 ubiquitin ligase and its effect on motor and sensory neuron degeneration.
Education and scientific pursuits In 1981, Steve Kay earned his bachelor's degree in Biochemistry at University of Bristol, UK. He stayed there in the Trevor Griffiths lab and received his PhD in 1985 exploring the light regulation of chlorophyll synthesis in plants. Kay learned that light changed gene expression, and that circadian clock was also regulating transcription on a daily basis. He would later spend more than two decades pursuing these circadian clocks. Following Griffiths' advice, Kay moved to the United States and worked as a postdoc in the Nam-Hai Chua lab at Rockefeller University. It was at the Nam-Hai Chua lab working with another postdoc named Ferenc Nagy that Kay stumbled upon the discovery that the chlorophyll binding gene CAB was regulated by a circadian clock. In 1989, Kay was appointed to his first faculty position as an assistant professor at Rockefeller University. While there, he collaborated with Michael W. Young to identify fly PER gene homologues, which did not exist. Kay then developed glowing Arabidopsis thaliana plants to screen for circadian rhythm mutants, with the help of his student Andrew Millar, and subsequently identified TOC1, the first clock gene identified in plants. He moved several times and became an associate professor in the biology department at the University of Virginia in 1996 where he joined the NSF Center for Biological Timing. 4 years later he moved to The Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, Ca. There, Kay collaborated with Jeffrey C. Hall and discovered a cryptochrome mutant in fruit flies, also demonstrating that clock genes were distributed all over the body, which was named one of Science's top 10 breakthroughs in 1997. Kay also teamed up with Joe Takahashi to identify fly's CLOCK gene and its binding partner dBMAL1 and complete the transcription-translation feedback loop in flies in 1998. In 1999, Kay established his second lab adjacent to Scripps Research Institute at the Genomics Institute of the Novartis Research Foundation to initiate new work on the mammalian clock. He and his postdoctoral fellow John B. Hogenesch, realized that in order to discover novel mammalian clock genes one would have to leverage high throughput genomics techniques that were being developed at the time. In 2002, Kay's group identified the novel photoreceptor melanopsin (Opn4) and how it worked in conjunction with the visual photoreceptors. Kay's work, along with others in the field, on melanopsin was named one of "Science's" top 10 breakthroughs that year. Kay and Hogenesch also collaborated with Takahashi to define the mammalian circadian transcription and the large scale orchestration of gene expression by the circadian clocks in most tissues throughout the body. In 2001, Kay served as director for the Institute for Childhood and Neglected Diseases at the Scripps Research Institute. He also served as professor and chairman there in subsequent years. In addition to his academic experiences, Kay also founded biotechnology companies like Phenomix Corporation in 2003. In 2007, Dr. Kay became professor and then the dean of the biology department at the UC San Diego. From 2012 to 2015, he served as a professor and the Dean of Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences at the University of Southern California (USC). In September 2015, he was named president of The Scripps Research Institute. In 2016, he was re-appointed to the University of Southern California (USC).
Scientific contributions to circadian rhythms
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