Lay is a third-year PhD student in the Oral Health Sciences department. Proud to be a Husky for the third time, she has returned to the University of Washington for her doctoral studies after earning her BA in Business Administration (Information Systems) and MS in Oral Biology. As a registered hygienist, Lay sees dental patients in the Graduate Periodontics Clinic at the University of Washington School of Dentistry. Lay was a dental hygiene educator who had taught as a first-year lead in the Dental Hygiene program at Clark College in Vancouver, WA and as a senior lecturer in the Oral Health Therapy program at Nanyang Polytechnic in Singapore. She also received her MEd in Educational Assessment from the National Institute of Education/Nanyang Technological University while teaching in Singapore from 2012 to 2022. Lay is currently leading aspects of our NIH- and NIDCR-funded clinical trial on experimental gingivitis as an examiner and will investigate inflammatory responder types in this study as part of her PhD thesis. Outside of the lab and clinic, Lay enjoys hiking and reading.