Tomas Kay, Ph.D.

Tomas Kay is a postdoctoral researcher in the laboratory of Dr. Daniel Kronauer at the Rockefeller University. His research uses ants to understand the evolution of social behavior and how social interactions shape behavior from molecular and evolutionary perspectives.

Kay is a lifelong naturalist who became interested in how sociality shapes phenotypic evolution while studying biological sciences at Magdalen College, Oxford. He spent his master’s and Ph.D. at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland, where he combined automated behavioral tracking with molecular approaches to understand social insect behavior and underlying physiology. His research has shown that social interaction patterns predict future behavioral changes, that an individual’s brain physiology and gut microbiota composition are highly correlated with its social network position and that the composition of the gut microbiota determines emergent colony-level behavioral dynamics.