Steve Kay

Americans likely will always want personal transportation options, aka a car. Fueling those vehicles is becoming increasingly expensive, if not yet problematic. Bringing expertise in one possible solution, biofuels, is Steve Kay, the new dean of UCSD’s Division of Biological Sciences.

“I strongly believe in the application of biological knowledge as an agent of change,” he says. “We are using new genomic tools to understand ecosystems better, the land-sea interface and for better stewardship of local areas. Biology has an impact in the biofuels arena, and students should be enriched in this.”

Kay also brings to the position a keen business sense.

In September, before leaving The Scripps Research Institute, Kay served as the vice chairman of the Scripps Florida Steering Committee where he co-authored the Scripps Florida business plan that led to the appropriation of more than $500 million in state and local funds to establish a Scripps Research campus in Palm Beach County. Kay also has private sector clout: from 1999 to 2002, he served as the director of discovery research at the Genomics Institute of the Novartis Research Foundation, where he built a large department of researchers applying functional genomics technology to biomedical research and drug discovery.