After earning a PhD in India, Dey landed a postdoc in the United States, But when he arrived in Kansas City, Kansas, in 1972 with eight dollars in his pocket, he had nowhere to stay and no one greeted him. His mentor's number was unlisted. Eventually, with the help of the university's vice chancellor, he found some lodging. See CV

“That was a pretty scary 24 hours,” Dey says. It was an inauspicious beginning to a productive research career; Dey ended up staying at the university nearly 30 years and publishing hundreds of papers on reproductive biology, an ambition inspired by watching his parents struggle to provide for their 12 children on the outskirts of Calcutta.

But things got worse in Kansas City before they got better. On his own initiative, Dey studied whether preimplantation embryos produce steroid hormones, which are critical for embryo implantation. But it was his mentor, not Dey, who received first authorship — the first of a few such incidents. With thoughts of abandoning his postdoc and the United States, Dey visited the department chair, who offered Dey a job independent of his former mentor, with one year to get his own funding.

“That was the best mentoring I ever had to steer through my career path,” says Dey. He literally knocked on doors and formed collaborations at Kansas City “out of necessity”. The strategy worked. Dey eventually earned his own first-author paper and landed National Institutes of Health funding.

His basic reproductive biology research encompasses embryo implantation and several forms of cancer, and some stem-cell work. “I am quite aggressive in terms of collaboration,” Dey says. “I just pick up the phone and ask.” That approach helped get him recruited at Vanderbilt.

Dey's Vanderbilt enthusiasm was short-lived, owing to limited institutional support for reproductive sciences. Former Vanderbilt colleague Arnie Strauss, now head of Cincinnati Children's Research Foundation, asked Dey to come to the foundation's Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center. Strauss clinched the deal by asking Dey to start a new division of reproductive sciences.

“He's a tremendous collaborator,” says Strauss. He calls Dey a “tenacious” investigator, who tackles difficult goals by bringing people together and sharing credit. Dey says he learned his biggest lesson — one he passes on to students, postdocs and junior faculty — on that first day in Kansas City. “You have to be stubborn but generous,” he says.