Brian K. Kay earned his A.B. and Ph.D. degrees in cell biology at the University of Chicago and Yale University, respectively. He then did post-doctoral training at the National Institutes of Health, where he learned cell and developmental biology and honed his skills in molecular biology. He has had academic appointments at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Argonne National Laboratory, and finally at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where he was Professor and Head of the Department of Biological Sciences. His research focused on mapping protein-protein interactions, generating recombinant affinity reagents, and phage-display, and has a h Index of 59. He has co-founded two companies, Novalon Pharmaceuticals and Tango Biosciences, based on his phage-display expertise. Novalon was acquired in 2000 for $104M.