Kê was born in Penglai, Shandong province. He was admitted to Tsinghua University in 1930 but suffered pulmonary disease which required him to rest for two years where he earned a B.S. in physics in 1937. He obtained an M.S. in physics at Yenching University in 1940. In July 1941, Kê married He Yizhen in Shanghai and the following month they traveled together to California. Kê received his Ph.D. in physics after only pursuing it for two years at the University of California at Berkeley in 1943. In the years 1943–1945 and 1945–1949, respectively, he worked as a staff member at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and research associate at the University of Chicago.
In 1949, Kê returned to China and became a professor in physics at Tsinghua University and a research associate at the Applied Physics Laboratory of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS). In October 1952, he relocated to Shenyang to participate in the establishment of the Institute of Metal Research of CAS as a research associate where he became deputy director from 1961 to 1981. In 1955, Kê was elected academician of CAS and became a member of the Mathematics and Physics Committee of CAS. In 1980, he was transferred to Hefei for the establishment of the Hefei branch of CAS where he served as its deputy director and later jointly became the first head of the Institute of Solid State Physics incepted in March 1982.
In 1979 he was a visiting professor at the Max-Planck Institut für Metallforschung in Germany, and in 1980, a guest professor at the INSA de Lyon in France.