Dr. Waye received the degree of Bachelor of Science (Hon) from the University of Western Ontario, Canada, majoring in Bacteriology and Immunology and then took graduate work and received Ph.D. in Medical Biophysics at the University of Toronto , Canada . During her graduate period, she received support as a research student of the National Cancer Institute. Her graduate work involves molecular studies of asparagine synthetase, an enzyme important for the treatment of the cancer by the chemotherapeutic agent, asparaginase. On completing her Ph.D. she received a King George V Fellowship and received her post-doctoral training at the Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Medical Research Council, in Cambridge, UK as a National Cancer Institute Research Fellow. She did research in the area of Site-directed mutagenesis of the promoter of tyrosyl-tRNA synthetase in the Division of Protein and Nucleic Acid and later also received training in the Division of Structural Studies in Cambridge , working towards expressing eukaryotic histones for crystallization and helped in the understanding the nucleosomes. Dr. Waye returned to Toronto, Canada as an assistant professor for the Medical Research Group in Periodontal Physiology, Department of Dentistry, University of Toronto from 1986-1992. She then went back to Hong Kong as a lecturer of the Department of Biochemistry and has been there ever since, as an associate professor, then professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. She was appointed as the founding director of the Croucher laboratory for Human Genomics in 2004. She was elected as the president of the Hong Kong Society of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology in 2006.
Dr. Waye has published more than 130 articles in refereed international scientific journals. She has been invited to review papers in numerous international scientific journals and co-organized many conferences and workshops. She is a co-inventor of 2 US patens.
Dr. Waye's research interest is focused on molecular biology, genomics, gene regulation and expression studies. She has been active in the characterization of novel mammalian genes, including the protein family of Four and a Half LIM Domain proteins and has successfully used the Green fluorescent proteins as biosenors to study protein-protein interactions. She is one of the members of the International HapMap consortium. One of her current research topics involves studies on complex disease susceptibility genes by genotype analyses, including developmental dyslexia, possession of perfect pitch, susceptibility to suicide and psychiatric diseases, e.g. bipolar disorder.