W. Harmon Ray

W. Harmon Ray, born Willis Harmon Ray in 1940, is an American chemical engineer, control theorist and applied mathematician. He earned his bachelor's degree in chemical engineering at Rice University in 1963 and his doctorate at the University of Minnesota in 1966 under Rutherford Aris. He taught at the University of Waterloo, the State University of New York at Buffalo and, from 1976, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he became a Vilas Research emeritus professor in 2003 and supervised 53 doctoral and 30 master's students. His research covers mathematical modelling, control theory, process optimization, chemical reaction engineering and polymerization processes. He was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 1991, received the Richard E. Bellman Control Heritage Award in 2000 and won the Neal Amundson Award in 2019.