Professor Kay received a BA in Liberal Arts from St. John’s College in Santa Fe, New Mexico and then worked for the original GenBank project at Los Alamos National Laboratory from 1982-85. She worked as a programmer/analyst in business applications for a number of years in the mid- to late 80s, and then returned to graduate school at UC Berkeley. She completed her dissertation research in the laboratory of Walter J. Freeman, and received a Ph.D. in Biophysics in 1995. Kay completed postdoctoral research in the laboratory of Gilles Laurent at the California Institute of Technology, where she studied olfactory bulb mitral cell responses to changes in odor context.