Ray Stata

Family and schooling

Raymond Stuart 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.^[1] In the first grade, Stata attended a one-room school with one teacher serving eight grades. Then, his parents moved to the outskirts of Baltimore to work at an aircraft factory during WWII. ^[1] Ray attended Oxford High School in Oxford, Pennsylvania.

Stata married Maria in June, 1962. The two reside in the Boston area, where they raised their son Raymie and daughter Nicole.^[1] Raymie graduated from MIT and founded Stata Labs which was acquired by Yahoo! in 2004.^[2] In 2010, Yahoo! named Raymie CTO. Later on, Raymie founded Altiscale. Nicole is also a serial entrepreneur having started Deploy Solutions which she sold to Kronos before funding Boston Seed Capital, a seed venture capitalist that invests in early stage startups

Stata earned BSEE and MSEE degrees from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). In 1965, Ray founded Analog Devices, Inc. (ADI) 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's Inland Controls Division.^[1] Besides ADI and Solid State Instruments, Stata is founder of Stata Venture Partners,^[2] a venture capital firm in the Boston area that funded many Boston area startups like Nexabit Networks. In June 1999, Nexabit Networks was acquired by Lucent for $960M at the high water mark of the dot-com bubble.^[3]

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 Founder's Medal.^[3]

Philanthropy

'As co-founder and the first President of the Massachusetts High Technology Council, Stata advocated that engineering education and university research funding were a shared responsibility of government and industry. MHTC also advocated for state government policies to make Massachusetts the best state in which to live and work.' ^[5]

At the federal level, he served on the Executive Committee of the Council on Competitiveness from 1987 to 2005. Stata's service on the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award Board of Overseers stemmed from his professional commitment to total quality management.^[3]

He served on the Board of the Semiconductor Industry Association from January 1, 1996 to November 7, 2013.^[3]

Stata was also a founder and Chairman of the Center for Quality of Management, a group of Boston-area CEOs who learned from each other by sharing best practices and by developing and delivering Total Quality Management training programs to help their companies become more competitive.^[3]

He was actively engaged in the stewardship of MIT, his alma mater, in several roles. Until 2010 he was the Chairman of the Visiting Committee of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. In 1984, he was elected to MIT's Corporation and served as a member of its Executive Committee. From 1987-1988 he served as President of the MIT Alumni Association.^[3]

In 1997, Stata made a significant contribution 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.^[3]

Ray and Maria are life trustees of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. In August, 1999 Ray and Maria Stata endowed the Music Director chair position.^[3]

Honors[3]

Publications by Ray Stata

Interviews with Ray