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.
McCray grew up in rural southwestern Pennsylvania and later attended graduate school at the University of Arizona where he studied with W. David Kingery and Michael Schiffer. After working at George Washington University's Center for History of Recent Science and the American Institute of Physics' Center for History of Physics, he took a professorship at UCSB.
McCray is the author of three books and several articles. His first book detailed the history of Venetian glass technology during the Renaissance. His interest in glass making got him interested in how large mirrors for modern telescopes are made. This led him to write about the politics and technologies associated with astronomers' efforts to build modern giant telescopes[1]. He has written about science and technology during the Cold War. An example is his 2008 book on Operation Moonwatch (Keep Watching the Skies! The Story of Operation Moonwatch and the Dawn of the Space Age) and amateur scientists in the period following the 1957 launch of Sputnik. In 2005, McCray co-founded the Center for Nanotechnology in Society [2] with a grant from the National Science Foundation and leads a research group focusing on the history of nanotechnology. In 2010, he was the co-recipient of a Collaborative Research Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies for this work. In 2011, he was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.