Jonathan Kay, MD

Jonathan Kay, MD, is professor of medicine and population and quantitative health sciences and holds the Timothy S. and Elaine L. Peterson Chair in Rheumatology at the University of Massachusetts Medical School in Worcester, where he directs clinical research in the Division of Rheumatology. His clinical appointment is as a physician at UMass Memorial Medical Center, also in Worcester. Dr Kay received his medical degree from the University of California, San Francisco, School of Medicine. He then completed an internship and residency at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia and fellowships in rheumatology and immunology at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School in Boston, MA.

Dr Kay is a fellow of the American College of Rheumatology and the American College of Physicians. In 2018, he received the Distinguished Service Award from the American College of Rheumatology and he was awarded honorary membership in the European League Against Rheumatism. He is an ad hoc reviewer for many journals and a member of the editorial boards of Best Practice & Research: Clinical Rheumatology  and RMD Open.

Dr Kay’s clinical interests span the spectrum of rheumatic diseases, with special interests in rheumatoid arthritis, spondyloarthropathies, and other forms of inflammatory arthritis. He was a member of the group that developed the 2010 American College of Rheumatology/European League Against Rheumatism Classification Criteria for Rheumatoid Arthritis. He chaired the Rheumatology Working Group and was a member of the Internal Medicine and Musculoskeletal Topic Advisory Groups for the World Health Organization in its revision of the International Classification of Diseases (ICD)-11.

Over the past 3 decades, his clinical research focused on nephrogenic systemic fibrosis, b₂2-microglobulin amyloidosis, and other rheumatologic problems of patients with chronic kidney disease. He has been a principal investigator for more than 60 clinical trials of novel therapies for rheumatoid arthritis, axial spondyloarthritis, gout, and osteoarthritis. Over the past decade, he has been involved in the development of biosimilars to treat rheumatic diseases. Dr Kay lectures internationally and is the author of more than 230 publications and book chapters.