Brad Kay
BY ANGIE MCADAM
Winner of IRSC’s Outstanding Adjunct Faculty award in 2011, Brad Kay came to teach at the college through a colorful and somewhat unlikely career.
“Every semester I teach a night class,” says the professor of microbiology. He says he identifies with those students who often are adult students with jobs and families.
“IRSC has kids like I was. I didn’t know what I wanted to do right after high school,” he said.
Born in New Jersey, Kay was the youngest of three children. Growing up, he participated in 4-H and other activities but never excelled in academics.
“High school was dismal,” says Kay.
Teachers always remarked that Kay never applied himself to his studies and he flunked most of his high school classes, some repeatedly. After high school, he went to a Christian college because he thought no other school would take him.
However, he dropped out after one semester and joined the Navy in 1966.
After four years in Navy and serving in Vietnam for nine months, Kay made a connection with God which helped inspire him to go back to college. With the support of his wife, Renee, Kay went to a junior college in California to obtain has associate’s degree in arts.
“I was 25 years old, married, and a freshman in college,” he said.
As an elective, he took microbiology. He said that the professor was so passionate about the subject that he had even written the textbook.
“He turned me onto micro,” says Kay.
He went onto get his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in microbiology.
He first worked in public health laboratory in San Diego, testing people for sexually transmitted diseases and diseases such as tuberculosis. He then took a position in a Massachusetts state laboratory, studying why college and doctor clinic laboratories were failing to accurately identify diseases. Through this position, he heard about a Center for Disease Control laboratory director-training program.
Through this program, Kay received a master’s and doctorate’s degrees in public health in 1982.
After just completing this program, CDC sent Kay to Peru to study diseases in children with Johns Hopkins University at the Cayetano Hereda Medical School in Lima.
It was this two years of applied research in Peru that qualified him for a position as the head of laboratories in a cholera hospital in Dhaka, Bangladesh. This large hospital’s research laboratory was working with Johns Hopkins and studying E. Coli and cholera, which had killed millions of people worldwide, to develop a vaccine.
Five years later, the University of Maryland offered Kay the position as the chief of intestinal microbiology to help them develop vaccines and conduct volunteer studies. After several years there, he had the opportunity to go to Latin America in 1991. He helped conduct workshops on disease control after cholera epidemics had broken out throughout South and Latin America.
In 1993, Kay moved to Atlanta where he worked again for CDC. He was then sent to Egypt to study vaccinations with the U.S. military medical team in Cairo and to Harare, Zimbabwe with the World Health Organization. In Africa, he held workshops for the laboratory directors of 46 African countries to assist them in strengthen their programs and properly diagnose diseases.
“Good diagnostics are cost-effective,” says Kay so that medicines are not given out unnecessarily due to misdiagnosis.
The World Health Organization then moved Kay to Lyon, France, to establish a program of workshops on an international level to train international public health laboratories. Three years later, in 2005, Kay moved to Geneva to address bioterrorism and develop a program with the World Health Organization against it.
In 2006, Kay, then 59, retired and moved to the quiet community of Sebastian. He did not plan to just to sit around.
“I wanted to give back. I wanted to teach microbiology,” said Kay.
At IRSC, he teaches microbiology and since most of his students plan to become nurses he says it’s a “perfect match.”
“I loved how he had personal stories of so many diseases many being from him studying it in some far fetched part of the world,” said Tabitha Ellis, one of Kay’s former students. “You can tell he really knew his stuff and was passionate it. Unlike many teachers that know about things in theroy and out of a book, he had truly studied and worked with these things. ”
He admits that it is a hard class, and that he wants it to be practical.
“Teaching at IRSC is as important as any work I’ve ever done in my career,” said Kay.
Tags: center for disease control, College, Indian River State College, IRSC, professor, students, world health organization
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