W. Patrick McCray (born 1967) is a historian at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He researches, writes about, and teaches the history of science and the history of technology.[1]
McCray grew up in rural southwestern Pennsylvania and later attended graduate school at the University of Arizona where he completed a Ph.D. in 1996. He is the author or editor of several books on the history of science and technology; topics include the effects of technology on astronomical practice, the activities of amateur scientists during the Cold War, and the activities of scientists who promoted radical visions for the technological future. More recently, McCray has studied and written about the interactions between art and technology. A new book, called Making Art Work, appeared in 2020 and documents interactions between engineers and artists from the 1960s to the present.
Prior to this, in his 2013 book The Visioneers, McCray presented the concept of "visioneer" as historical actor. As he defined it, the term is a portmanteau that refers to individuals (often with a science or engineering background) who imagined, designed, and built exploratory technologies. The Visioneers won the 2014 Watson Davis and Helen Miles Davis Prize Watson Davis and Helen Miles Davis Prize from the History of Science Society.
In 2005, McCray co-founded the Center for Nanotechnology in Society http://www.cns.ucsb.edu/home/ with a grant from the National Science Foundation. Until 2016, he led a research group focusing on the history of nanotechnology. In 2011, he was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and, in 2013, of the American Physical Society. In 2016 and 2017, McCray was a "Faculty Expert" and speaker for the World Economic Forum's meeting in Davos, Switzerland.[2] [3]