Education in a Rich Scientific Environment

Dr. Kay has and will continue to participate in didactic teaching primarily at the graduate and medical school level. However, his most rewarding experiences come from training graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and medical residents/fellows to become competent laboratory researchers. Currently, there are 7 post-doctoral fellows in our laboratory. Three of Dr. Kay’s earlier laboratory graduates have gone on to obtain faculty positions at the University of Washington, Marshfield Clinic, and the National Institute of Health Sciences in Tokyo. Others have gone on to post-doctoral and/or medical fellowships, or have become staff scientists in biopharmaceutical companies.

Dr. Kay’s philosophy is to provide a rich scientific environment and encourage individuals to develop hypothesis-driven research ideas along with the skills necessary to execute the studies to completion in well-controlled experiments. This applies to students, post-doctoral fellows and clinical fellows as well.

As part of the NIH-funded Program of Excellence in Gene Therapy, we are developing a unique training program to educate individuals both in the basic science and clinical protocols related to gene therapy. Dr. Kay is working to integrate the laboratory with the clinical research strengths at Stanford University to train a unique class of young investigators.