Rate My Professor Laura Ray

Laura Ray is the Myron Tribus Professor of Engineering Innovation and Senior Associate Dean for Faculty Development at Dartmouth College's Thayer School of Engineering, where she has been a faculty member since 1996. She previously served as Interim Dean of the Thayer School in 2018. Ray earned a BSE in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering from Princeton University in 1984, an MSE in Mechanical Engineering from Stanford University in 1985, and a PhD in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering from Princeton University in 1991. Her professional contributions include co-founding Sound Innovations, Inc., and Clarisond, Inc., and co-leading Dartmouth’s NSF I-Corps Site to promote innovation and entrepreneurship. Ray has earned prestigious awards such as the Outstanding Service Award for Faculty from Dartmouth Engineering in 2022, Senior Member of the National Academy of Inventors in 2020, Dartmouth Technology Innovation and Commercialization Award in 2019, American Society for Non-destructive Testing Fellowship in 2001, and Ralph R. Teetor Educational Award from SAE in 1997. She is a member of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, and holds five U.S. patents related to ictal state identification, noise cancellation, and adaptive filtering.

Ray's research centers on system dynamics and controls, robotics, machine intelligence, and agricultural robots. Her NASA- and NSF-funded projects develop autonomous robots for extreme environments, including polar regions to support scientific operations in Antarctica and the Arctic. She has led student teams to victories like the 2019 NASA BIG Idea Challenge. An author of more than 100 peer-reviewed articles, key publications include "Accelerating Change of Practice Through Targeted Professional Development in Data Science" (Journal of Statistics and Data Science Education, 2025), "Tactile Sensing & Visually-Impaired Navigation in Densely Planted Row Crops, for Precision Fertilization by Small UGVs" (Computers and Electronics in Agriculture, 2025), "Incipient Immobilization Detection for Lightweight Rovers Operating in Deformable Terrain" (ASME Journal of Autonomous Vehicles and Systems, 2022), "Assessing the Feasibility of Detecting Epileptic Seizures Using Non-Cerebral Sensor Data" (Computers in Biology and Medicine, 2021), and "Velocity Field of the McMurdo Shear Zone (MSZ) from Annual Ground Penetrating Radar Imaging and Crevasse Matching" (Cold Regions Science and Technology, 2020). Ray's work has advanced robotics for challenging terrains and multi-robot coordination.