Kay is a registered patent agent with a professional and academic background in chemistry. She primarily works with clients in the biotechnology and pharmaceuticals industries.

Kay has a broad range of capabilities in organic synthesis, molecular biology, and synthetic biology. She has experience with various methods of chemical purification and characterization, including NMR, infrared (IR), and ultraviolet-visual (UV-vis) spectroscopy as well as mass spectrometry and chromatography. She has also done work in the areas of gene therapeutics, virus-like particle encapsulation, and enzyme kinetics.     

Prior to joining Mintz, Kay was a lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley, where she taught introductory and organic chemistry courses. Previously, she worked as a cell and molecular biology research associate in chemistry at an RNA-editing company. In that role, she prepared new formulations of antisense oligonucleotides (ASOs) for RNA editing.

As an undergraduate, Kay was awarded a National Science Foundation Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) Internship in chemistry. During that time, she designed and analyzed experiments relating to the effects of Qβ virus-like particle encapsulation on enzyme stabilization.