Dr. Durwood Ray is professor of biology at Grove City College, a four-year, private Christian liberal arts and engineering college located in Grove City, Pennsylvania. He is a Fellow and Coordinator for the Medical Ethics Working Group with The Center for Vision & Values, a Grove City College think-tank/policy center. Ray has done research and taught for 16 years in graduate and medical education and 11 years in undergraduate education. In the past two years, Ray has led a two-day Stem Cell Research and Religion forum at St. Lukes Church of the Mountains in La Cresenta, California and has been interviewed on several radio stations broadcasting in parts of Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas, Wyoming, Colorado, and Missouri on “The ABCs of Embryonic, Cord Blood, Adult Stem Cell Research and Therapeutic Cloning”. Prior to coming to Grove City College in 1994, he was awarded over $1.3 million in extramural direct cost research funding from the National Science Foundation, The National Institutes of Health, the American Cancer Society, the Veterans Administration Merit Review Projects and the American Heart Association to do endocrine, breast cancer, biochemical and molecular biology research. He has published over 14 research papers, 47 abstracts, 1 book chapter, and presented 38 research talks at national, international meetings and various academic and industrial research labs in the US. He has served as a cell culture consultant to two international corporations that sell cell culture technologies for the growth of mammal cells in culture. He has special training in Yeast Genetics and Molecular Biology at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratories in New York and in Flow Cytometry Technology at the Coulter Becton Labs in San Jose, California.
Dr. Ray has served as a journal and grant application reviewer. Dr. Ray has directed Master's, PhD, and MD/PhD theses, as well as many undergraduate research projects while doing research in areas of Tumor Biology, Human and Animal Tumor Genetics, Yeast Genetics, Mammary Gland Biology, Mitochondrial Biogenesis, Oncology, Physiology, Cell and Molecular Biology, Immunology, Wildlife Genetics, Endocrinology, and Biochemistry.
Some of the on-going undergraduate research projects he helps supervise at Grove City College include sequencing the DNA of several human cancer derived genes, mostly in breast tumor studies, establishing a series of mouse cell lines representing normal, pre-cancer, cancer, advanced cancer and metastatic cancer forms, characterizing these cell lines with respect to mitochondrial genetics, morphology, and metabolism, micro-array expression analysis of 17,500 mouse genes in normal, cancer and metastatic cancer cell lines, genetic characterization of migratory and resident Canada Geese, sequencing the entire genome of the mitochondrial DNA of a Canada Goose. This Grove City research has contributed 6 new DNA gene sequences to the National Center for Biotechnology Information gene bank repository for a variety of species including human cancer nuclear and mitochondrial genes, various geese species and bumble bees.
He has current research collaborations with labs at the University of Pittsburgh, Duquesne University, the University of Texas at San Antonio, and the Brooke Army Medical Center Department of Clinical Investigations at San Antonio. He co-teaches a summer travel course on Medical Research Techniques at Brooke Army Medical Center.
He has been active in Sigma Xi, the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, American Association for the Advancement of Science and the Fellowship of Christian Biochemists. He was awarded the Superior Performance Award by the Veterans Administration as Research Chemist in Medical Endocrinology Research, the Sigma Xi Pursuit of Excellence in Science Education Award, named to Who’s Who in Science and Engineering, and named twice to Who’s Who Among America’s Teachers.
Ray, a native of Houston, Texas, began his career in cancer research as a Summer Student Research Trainee for four years at the University of Texas, M.D. Anderson Hospital and Tumor Institute in Houston, Texas. He received his Bachelor’s degree from the University of Texas at Austin in Chemistry and his PhD from the University of Pittsburgh in Biochemistry while studying human cancer cells. He was then a post-doctoral research fellow at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical School in Dallas, Texas.
Ray then did research at the Cleveland Veterans Administration Medical Center and taught as Assistant Professor in the Departments of Medicine, Nutrition and Biochemistry at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine in Cleveland, Ohio for ten years; for eight of those years he was also appointed as Research Chemist in Medical Research at the VA. He taught as Associate Professor of Biochemistry at Oral Roberts University, School of Medicine, in Tulsa, Oklahoma for five years and was awarded tenure in 1989.
He also helped design and establish in a cancer treatment hospital in Tulsa, Oklahoma a 12 member molecular & cellular oncology department and then served as its Director for three years managing his department’s personnel, and budgetary requirements ($640,000 average annual budget). After coming to Grove City College in 1994, he helped expand the undergraduate research program and direct the technical activities in the Molecular Genetics and Cell Culture laboratories. Ray lives with his wife Laurie in Grove City, PA. They have three sons, David, Walgreen’s store manager recruiter/trainer in Norfolk, Virginia, Chris, a Vice President for Bank of America in Dallas, Texas, and Andrew, Episcopal Priest in Pasadena, California.
Durwood B. Ray, Ph.D.
Professor of Biology
Grove City College | Box 3096| Grove City, PA 16127
Tel: 724.458.3791 | Email: dbray@gcc.edu
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