[2] She completed her postdoctoral training at the California Institute of Technology and was appointed in 2000 as an assistant professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Chicago.
Kay began her PhD at the University of California, Berkeley in 1985, but took a break from 1986 to 1990, during which she worked as an analyst and programmer and as a scientific reviewer for GenBank at Intelligenetics.
Kay completed her dissertation research and received a PhD in Biophysics from the University of California, Berkey in 1995 under advisor Walter Jackson Freeman III.
During her postdoctoral training in advisor Gilles Laurent's lab at Caltech, she studied how the responses of mitral cells in the olfactory bulb were affected by the behavioral context of the odor.
[4] At The University of Chicago, Kay served as director of the Institute for Mind & Biology from 2008 to 2014 and as the chair of the Integrative Neuroscience graduate program from 2014 to 2016.