Dr. McKay has almost 40 years experience in academia and industry. He is presently a professor of Sustainable Development at Hamad Bin Khalifa University. Before this, he was a Full Professor and Head of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering Department at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST). During his time in Hong Kong, he was Chairman of the Chemical Engineering Discipline of the Hong Kong Institute of Engineers.

Prior to joining HKUST in 1995, he spent 10 years in the industry. He established his own company, Consultancy Process Engineering and Management Systems, and this company was subcontracted to Project Management (PM) Ltd (Foster Wheeler Ireland) which employs over 600 staff and is Ireland's largest process engineering design company. He was the Senior Process Specialist, specializing in process plant design, environmental impact assessment and process plant safety. From 1971 to 1987, Dr. McKay was a Reader in the Chemical Engineering Department at Queen’s University, Belfast and he was a Training Consultant to the BP Oil Refinery in Northern Ireland. During this period in 1983/84, he was appointed as Project Manager for a European Commission Technical Assistance project at the University of Jordan. He has over 1000 publications, over 600 in international refereed journals and authored twelve books about energy, environment and process design. He co-authored the second most cited paper (15,000 cites to date) ever in the SCI Chemical Engineering sector and has a Scopus h-index of 101 and a Google Scholar h-index of 116.