Ray Stata

Raymond Stuart Stata (born 1934) is an American entrepreneur, engineer, and investor.

Early life and education
Stata was born on November 12, 1934, in the small farming community of Oxford, Pennsylvania to Rhoda Pearl Buchanan and Raymond Stanford Stata, a self-employed electrical contractor. In high school, Ray worked as an apprentice for his father. Ray's mother was a factory worker. Ray's sister, Joan Stata, was five years older and worked as a nurse in Wilmington, Delaware. In the first grade, Stata attended a one-room school with one teacher serving eight grades. His parents moved to the outskirts of Baltimore to work at an aircraft factory during WWII. Ray attended Oxford High School in Oxford, Pennsylvania. After high school, Stata earned Bachelor of Science and Master's degrees from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

Stata married Maria in June, 1962. The two reside in the Boston area, where they raised their son Raymie (born 1968) and daughter Nicole. Raymie graduated from MIT and founded Stata Labs which was acquired by Yahoo! in 2004, and in 2010, was named Yahoo!'s CTO. Nicole is also an entrepreneur, having started Deploy Solutions, which she sold to Kronos in 2007. She later founded Boston Seed Capital, a seed venture capitalist firm.

Career
In 1965, Ray founded Analog Devices, Inc. with MIT classmate Matthew Lorber in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Before founding Analog Devices, Stata and Lorber, together with Bill Linko, another MIT graduate, founded Solid State Instruments, a company which was acquired by Kollmorgen Corporation. In addition to Analog and Solid State Instruments, Stata is founder of Stata Venture Partners. They were early investors in Nexabit Networks, which in June 1999, was acquired by Lucent for $900M.

Stata is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Engineering, and was the recipient of the 2003 IEEE Founders Medal.

Industry work
Stata co-founded and was the first President of the Massachusetts High Technology Council (MHTC) in 1977. With MHTC, Stata has advocated for engineering education and university research funding as a shared responsibility of government and industry. Stata led MHTC to push for state government policies to make Massachusetts the best state in which to live and work.

Stata also worked on the federal level, on the executive committee of the Council on Competitiveness from 1987 to 2005. Stata was on the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award Board of Overseers, stemming from his professional commitment to total quality management.

He served on the board of the Semiconductor Industry Association from January 1, 1996, to November 7, 2013, and as the group's chairman in 2011. The group awarded Stata with the Robert N. Noyce Award, the industry's highest honor, in November, 2001.

Stata was engaged in the stewardship of MIT, his alma mater, in several roles. He was the Chairman of the Visiting Committee of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science until 2010. In 1984, he was elected to MIT's Corporation and was a member of its executive committee. From 1987 to 1988 he was President of the MIT Alumni Association.

In 1997, Stata contributed $25M to the construction of a new academic complex on the MIT campus called the Ray and Maria Stata Center. The building was designed by Frank Gehry.

Ray and Maria are life trustees of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. In 1999, Ray and Maria Stata endowed the music director chair position.

Ray Stata is a member of the Board of Directors for Nano-C, a leading producer of patented nanostructured carbon, including fullerenes and single-walled nanotubes. “Fundamental technology innovation can only come from the development of advanced materials. Nano-C is at the forefront of enabling groundbreaking change to semiconductors, mobile devices and renewable energy,” Stata said. Stata first invested in Nano-C in 2018 and has made subsequent investments since including June 2020.

Honors

 * 1990: Elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
 * 1992: Elected to the National Academy of Engineering
 * 1996: Named Foreign Fellow of Indian National Academy of Engineering
 * 2001: Recipient of the Semiconductor Industry Association's Robert M. Noyce Award for Leadership
 * 2003: Recipient of the IEEE Founders Medal
 * 2008: Recipient of EE Times "Lifetime Achievement" award
 * 2010: MIT Commencement Speaker

Publications

 * Co-author, Global Stakes, Ballinger Press, 1982
 * Co-author, The Innovators, Harper & Rowe, 1984
 * Published Article in MIT Sloan Management Review (1989), titled: "Organization Learning – The Key to Management Innovation"
 * Published Article in CQM Journal (1995), titled: "A Conversation about Conversations"
 * Published Article in Arthur D Little, titled: "Organizational Learning: The Key to Success in the 1990s"