[1] McCray grew up in rural southwestern Pennsylvania and later attended graduate school at the University of Arizona where he completed a Ph.D. in 1996.

A new book, called Making Art Work, appeared in 2020 and documents interactions between engineers and artists from the 1960s to the present.

As he defined it, the term is a portmanteau that refers to individuals (often with a science or engineering background) who imagined, designed, and built exploratory technologies.

In 2005, McCray co-founded the Center for Nanotechnology in Society with a grant from the National Science Foundation.

In 2016 and 2017, McCray was a "Faculty Expert" and speaker for the World Economic Forum's meeting in Davos, Switzerland.