Dr. Ray Steele is the founding Director of the Center for Information and Communication Sciences at Ball State University in Indiana. He has won teaching awards at both undergraduate and graduate levels and his work is published in the United States, Europe, Canada and Latin America. He is also an honorary professor at Hebei RTV University in China. Dr. Steele is professor of Management, Telecommunications, and Information and Communication Sciences. His unusually broad interdisciplinary background combines over 30 years of higher education leadership with 27 years of successfully running a business.

He is a Frank Stanton Fellow with the International Radio and Television Society, an early inductee into the Teleconferencing Hall of Fame, and the first academic to receive the Pfister Award from the Business Industry Consulting Services Organization (BICSI) and the University of South Florida, and he is the International Communication Association Foundation's second Montgomery Award winner. Most recently he received the Cyberstar award in Indiana for his contributions to technology in academe. He has created two of the nation's leading graduate academic programs in the telecommunications field, first at the University of Pittsburgh and later at Ball State University. In 1993, the Center won the National Networking Education Award from Network World Magazine, as well as the International Distance Learning Conference Partnership Award for K-12 Partnerships.

Dr. Steele created the first comprehensive electronic Campus of the Future at the University of Pittsburgh in 1983, and then later turned Ball State into a national model for the strategic application of information age technology in higher education with a 300 classroom fiber network for voice, data and video and distance learning.

He also created the first K-12 electronic school district model employing voice, data, video, satellite and fibre optics in the late 1980s. The United States Secretary of Education awarded Indiana's only "A+ for Breaking the Mold" School Award to Dr. Steele's America 2000 project, a K-12 technology complex in Westfield, Indiana. US News and World Report in 1993, selected the four top technologically capable K-12 environments in the US and Dr. Steele had led the creation of three of them. His "Asbury 2000," a fully electronic graduate theological seminary, was featured by USA Today, as a showcase model for theology schools for the late 90's.

He was twice President and Chairman of the Board of the United States Distance Learning Association (USDLA), and he serves on their board and is currently their International Ambassador. He is also a Board Member of the Irish Centre for Distance Education Research and Applications in Ireland and he serves as Chairman of the Board of the Indiana Distance Learning Association. He has provided expert testimony and counsel in Washington, D.C., worked with the FCC and several states legislatures and regulatory commissions. As a nationally known spokesman in the field of communication technologies, he has regularly spoken across the U.S. and in Canada, Europe, Mexico, China, Singapore, and Latin America. He has served as an Overseer for the International Engineering Consortium, with the Academic Development Committee of the International Communication Association, as well as technology advisor to TOEFL. He also serves on Listing Qualification Panels for NASDAQ.

He has consulted with Fortune 100 companies and their CEO's, universities, seminaries, state governments, and K-12 educators as well as healthcare clients in the U.S. and Canada.