Asok Ray earned the Ph.D. degree in Mechanical Engineering from Northeastern University, Boston, MA in 1976, and also graduate degrees in each of the disciplines of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics, and Computer Science.   Dr. Ray joined the Pennsylvania State University in July 1985, and is currently a Distinguished Professor of Mechanical Engineering and a Graduate Faculty of Electrical Engineering.  Prior to joining Penn State, Dr. Ray held research and academic positions at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Carnegie-Mellon University as well as management and research positions at GTE Strategic Systems Division, Charles Stark Draper Laboratory, and MITRE Corporation.   Dr. Ray is a naturalized citizen of USA since 1976.

Dr. Ray's original work has opened three new areas of multi-disciplinary science & technology that bear significant importance to the theory and practice of engineering disciplines in both defense and commercial sectors.

The first research area is Dr. Ray’s most recent contributions to the field of signal processing, control, and estimation is on anomaly detection via symbolic dynamic filtering and statistical pattern recognition. This research area has led to the development of a new technology for remote diagnosis and prognosis of air, water, and land platforms. From 2001 to 2007, Dr. Ray was the Principal Investigator of a Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative (MURI) grant. This MURI grant was awarded to Pennsylvania State University and collaborators (Duke, Carnegie Mellon, and Louisiana Tech) by the Army Research Office (ARO) in the area of Mathematics of Failures to conduct theoretical and experimental research on characterization and mitigation of anomalous behavior in complex dynamical systems. In addition, Dr. Ray was one of the grantees in the DARPA Information Exploitation Office (IXO) program on Command & Control - Mixed Initiative Control of Automa-Teams (MICA). These technologies have been transferred to industry through several SBIR and STTR projects for field applications in Department of Defense (DoD) sites (e.g., NAVAIR and NAVSEA) and NASA sites (e.g., NASA Glenn Research Center and NASA Marshall Space Flight Center). Currently, Dr. Ray is the Principal Investigator of a five-year multidisciplinary multi-University research project in the field of Science of Autonomy funded by the Office of Naval Research (ONR), where the research activities focus on: (i) Autonomous Perception & Intelligent Decision-making based, and (ii) Scalable & Robust Distributed Collaboration, based on the fundamental principles of Information Theory, Statistical Mechanics, and Automata Theory. Related to these research efforts, Dr. Ray had been one of the grantees in the PLUS-INP Program of the U.S. Navy that deals with actual undersea operations (e.g., mine countermeasure (MCM) and antisubmarine warfare (ASW)). Dr. Ray is also one of the three thrust leaders for a current (2007-2012) Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative (MURI) grant from the Army Research Office to conduct theoretical and experimental research on dynamic modeling and control of sensor networks for information fusion with applications to urban warfare.

The second research area addresses the field of life extending control of dynamical systems for structural durability, pioneered by Dr. Ray in early 1990’s, which demonstrates the power of Information Science & Technology (IST)-based cross-disciplinary research in decision & control science, computer science, electromechanical science, thermal science, and material science. This research has addressed real-time performance optimization, life extension, and self-healing control of aerospace structures and electromechanical systems by modeling the physics of material characteristics under dynamical environments perceived through a network of embedded sensors. Consequently, life extending control is considered essential for safe, reliable and economical operation of aging aircraft by NASA and Air Force, and of complex electromechanical systems like the Smart Ship by the Navy. NASA Glenn Research Center is implementing this concept of anomaly detection in gas turbine engines based on the principles of Symbolic Dynamics and Information Theory. Dr. Ray have been the principal investigator of sevear NASA awards in Integrated Vehicle Health Management (IVHM) for safety enhancement of spacecraft and commercial aircraft.  

The third research area is Dr. Ray's earlier work (1987-1994) on Integrated Communication and Control (ICCS). The role of ICCS is to coordinate and perform inter-related functions ranging from real-time multi-loop control to information monitoring and decision support. In ICCS, a feedback control loop is closed via a common communication channel that multiplexes real-time information from sensor to controller and controller to actuator along with data traffic from other control loops and management functions. This research work is another contribution that has found wide acceptance in the international community. The U.S. Army has been pursuing this research area through several Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative (MURI) grants in the field of Sensor Networks. This research has addressed the issues of performance degradation and potential instability in the closed loop system, resulting from time-varying and possibly stochastic delays due to asynchronous time-division multiplexing in the network protocol. These innovative theoretical concepts were experimentally validated first in the laboratory environment and subsequently on various platforms including the MIT nuclear reactor, MITR-II. Following Dr. Ray's original work, Westinghouse Electric developed a signal validation software that is currently used in commercial nuclear reactors.

In addition to his contributions as an Engineer/Scientist, Dr. Ray has excelled as an educator and a mentor in his professional career of over thirty five years.   Dr. Ray has consistently worked to enhance the standard of interdisciplinary graduate education in Mechanical, Electrical, and Aerospace Engineering. Along this line Dr. Ray introduced several interdisciplinary graduate courses encompassung the fields of Applied Mathematics, Optimization & Control, Signal Processing & Pattern Recognition, Information Theory, and Chaos and nonliear Dynamics. Specifically, Dr. Ray has been a strong advocate for the role of modern mathematics and information sciences in engineering education. Dr. Ray, along with his colleagues, developed the Dynamical systems & Control Laboratory for experimental studies in several senior-level and graduate-level Mechanical Engineering courses in the fields of Modeling, Control, & Estimation, Signal Processing, and Robotics.

   At Penn State, Dr. Ray has supervised about fifty doctoral dissertations and over eighty master theses or projects.    His former students are currently holding or have held academic positions in U.S. and foreign universities, and research positions in organizations like Naval Research Laboratory, Argonne National Research Laboratory, Idaho National Research Laboratory, Oakridge National Research Laboratory, Boeing High Technology Center, General Electric Global Research Center, General Motors Research Laboratories, IBM Watson Research Center, and United Technology Research Center at USA and abroad. . 

Over five hundred research publications (including about two hundred and sixty scholarly articles in refereed journals and research monographs) and over forty technical reports based on sponsored research.