W. Patrick McCray is a professor in the Department of History at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Originally trained as a scientist, he is the author or editor of six books.
McCray’s 2013 book is The Visioneers: How an Elite Group of Scientists Pursued Space Colonies, Nanotechnologies, and a Limitless Future won the Watson Davis Prize fin 2014 from the History of Science Society as the “best book written for a general audience.”
His new book – titled Making Art Work: How Cold War Engineers and Artists Forged a New Creative Culture – appeared with The MIT Press in October 2020. This book looks at the collaborations between artists, engineers, and scientists from the 1950s to the present and explores how new creative cultures were built and maintained. In addition to receiving several grants from the National Science Foundation – including $15 million to create a national center for exploring the societal implications of new technologies – McCray has received fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the California Institute of Technology, and the Smithsonian Institution. He is
an elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and the American Physical Society (APS). In 2016 and 2017, McCray was an invited speaker at the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland.