Kay is the Programme Leader for the MA in Education with TESOL, is a senior lecturer on the BA TESOL and Linguistics, and also lectures on the MA programme. She previously worked as a senior lecturer on the BA in Education Studies at BGU and continues to contribute to the programme as a guest lecturer.

She has many years' experience as a TEFL teacher in the UK and overseas, and has taught EAP pre-sessional courses at the University of Nottingham.

Her research background is as a linguistic ethnographer and she conducted fieldwork for her PhD in Vanuatu, in the South Pacific, which is the most linguistically-dense nation in the world. Kay’s research interests span topics within theoretical linguistics, sociolinguistics and applied linguistics, and has most recently worked with education sector partners in Vanuatu to increase their capacity for local language literacy in educational and community contexts.

She has taught linguistics at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) and worked as a Lecturer in Linguistics at the University of Kingston in London (2014-18).

Kay gained her BA in French and English from the University of Liverpool and obtained an MA in Language Documentation and Description (2009), and a PhD in Field Linguistics (2014) from SOAS.