High-risk Pregnancy Expert Joins UAMS College of Medicine

By todd

LITTLE ROCK – Helen H. Kay, M.D., an expert in the medical care of high-risk pregnancy patients, has joined the faculty of the College of Medicine at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences (UAMS). She is professor and chair of the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology.


Kay comes to UAMS from Edward Hospital in Naperville, Ill., where she was director of the Department of Maternal Fetal Medicine. Maternal fetal medicine is the medical subspecialty of high-risk obstetrics.


A native of Hong Kong, Kay received a bachelor’s degree in biology from the University of Chicago and her medical degree from Yale University in New Haven, Conn. She completed a residency in obstetrics and gynecology at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., and a fellowship in maternal fetal medicine at Duke University Medical Center in Durham, N.C. She also completed a research fellowship at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, Pregnancy Research Branch, of the National Institutes of Health.

She was on the faculty at Duke University School of Medicine for 13 years, rising through the ranks from instructor, to assistant professor, to associate professor with tenure. She then assumed the post of professor with tenure and director of the Division of Maternal-Fetal Medicine at the University of Wisconsin at Madison until 2002, when she returned to Chicago to direct the Maternal-Fetal Medicine Service at Edward Hospital, a clinical affiliate of the University of Chicago.

 

Kay is a diplomat of the American Board of Obstetrics and Gynecology and is certified by this organization in general obstetrics and gynecology and in the subspecialty of maternal fetal medicine. She has been a board examiner for the American Board of Obstetrics and Gynecology since 1995. She serves on the board of directors of the Society for Maternal Fetal Medicine and on the editorial board of the journal, Obstetrics and Gynecology. Kay is an active member of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, the Society for Gynecologic Investigation and the Perinatal Research Society. Since 1999, she has served as a maternal fetal medicine consultant on a South African initiative to study fetal alcohol syndrome; the project is sponsored by the National Institute of Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, part of the National Institutes of Health.


Kay has published extensively in scientific literature and has been funded numerous times for major research projects. She is currently a co-investigator and project leader on a program project grant that she hopes to transfer to the UAMS College of Medicine. Her research interests include clinical perinatology; magnetic resonance imaging in pregnancy; ultrasound imaging in obstetrics; Doppler flow studies in high-risk pregnancy; intrauterine growth retardation; pre-eclampsia/hypertensive diseases in pregnancy; placental metabolism and effects of oxygen tension and hypoxia; and fetal alcohol syndrome.