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Biographical Information
on Dr. Roger Ray

    Launching my Own Higher-Ed Career:

        After teaching secondary school I had doggedly pursued my doctorate with the idea of an eventual career in teaching, not research. But I have to admit the dissertation tweaked a bit of interest in continuing what active research I could afford after joining the faculty at my college alma mater, Rollins College, in 1969. I started as an Assistant Professor of Behavioral Sciences, became an Associate Professor of Behavior Science in 1974, and by 1978 a full professor. In 1979 the Behavioral Science Department split along more traditional professional lines and I became Head of the newly formed Department of Psychology at Rollins.

    Research and Russia:

        Over those same years, I doggedly pursued my interest in developing innovations in psychological research methodology and kept my eye on opportunities to continue research on somatic-autonomic coupling dynamics. In 1971 my long-time colleague and collaborator, Dr. Jim Upson, and I established a Rollins field-research lab in the out-island Bahamas for doing naturalistic cross-cultural contingency analysis and radical phenomenological research (Ray and Ray, 1976). I spent a six-month post-doctoral period in 1974 as a Health Professional Exchange Scientist working in Pavlov's original lab at the Institute for Experimental Medicine in then Leningrad, USSR. This lab was then directed by M. M. Khananashvili and was especially focused on continuing much of the traditional work with dogs and various forms of conditioning, including what in the West was being called operant conditioning (c.f., Ray, 1977a, 1977b).

    Forsaking Dogs for Killer Whales:

        I no sooner had arrived home from Russia that the head trainer from Sea World of Orlando contacted me to see if I would have any interest in doing research on performance regiments and health maintenance of marine mammals. Who wouldn't? But before collecting a lot of new data, I felt compelled to communicate data I had collected over the past five or six years that had not been published. This early research reflects my grad-school influences from cybernetics, ethology (especially its emphasis on observational methods and behavioral patterning), and operant vs. classical conditioning. We tried a convergence of these methods in experimental settings using rats in operant chambers (Ray and Brown, 1975; 1976) as well as cross-cultural school settings with children (Ray and Ray, 1976). After getting these rather dusty data into print, I then spent the next few years doing research on biological rhythms and somatic-autonomic couplings in Killer Whales (Ray, Upson, and Henderson, 1977; Ray, Upson, and Henderson 1978; Ray, 1983; 1984; and Ray, Carlson, Carlson, Carlson, and Upson, 1986).

    On to Baboons:

        Of course I didn't leave behind my prior research connections with Soviet psychophysiologists and neuro scientists--many of whom were quite sophisticated in cybernetics and systems analysis. Eventually I made several trips back to the Soviet Union, as well as other Eastern-Block Communist states. This, plus the work I had done using power-spectral analysis of respiratory and behavioral velocities, got noticed by a research group at the Primate Center at the University of Washington, Seattle. Orville Smith and numerous other colleagues were gearing up to do a major collaborative project with Soviet scientists investigating somatic-autonomic couplings and social stressors in baboon family groups. This research was to be conducted at both the Seattle facility and at the Soviet Union's premiere primate breeding facility on the Black Sea at Soumi. Orv invited me to join the team and I promptly gave up killer whales for this much more manipulative and controlled model for exploring somatic-autonomic coupling dynamics under socially stressful conditions. So in 1985, I took the family to Seattle for the summer so I could do the preliminary work on establishing a workable behavioral coding system suitable for parcing out cardiovascular variabilities. Six years later we had our first publication (Astley, Smith, Ray, Golanov, Chesney, Chalyan, Taylor, & Bowden; 1991). But by that time, my research had taken a dramatic turn!

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