Jack Baker is a Professor of Civil & Environmental Engineering and Associate Dean for Faculty Affairs in the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability. He uses probabilistic and statistical tools to quantify and manage disaster risk and resilience. He has made contributions to risk analysis of spatially distributed systems, characterization of earthquake ground motions, and simulation of post-disaster recovery. He is an author of the textbook Seismic Hazard and Risk Analysis, Director of the Stanford Urban Resilience Initiative, Editor-in-Chief of Earthquake Spectra, and a Co-Founder of Haselton Baker Risk Group.
Prior to Stanford, Professor Baker was a visiting researcher at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH Zurich). He has degrees in Structural Engineering (Stanford, M.S. 2002, Ph.D. 2005), Statistics (Stanford, M.S. 2004) and Mathematics/Physics (Whitman College, B.A. 2000). His awards include the William B. Joyner Lecture Award from the Seismological Society of America and Earthquake Engineering Research Institute, Shah Family Innovation Prize from the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute, the CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation, the Early Achievement Research Award from the International Association for Structural Safety and Reliability, the Walter L. Huber Prize from the American Society of Civil Engineers, the Helmut Krawinkler Award from the Structural Engineers Association of Northern California, and the Eugene L. Grant Award for excellence in teaching from Stanford.
8/29/2023: Jack Baker gave the 2023 Te Hiranga Rū QuakeCoRE Annual Meeting Distinguished Lecture, "Engineering models to support regional disaster resilience assessment" at Napier, New Zealand.
8/25/2023: Jack Baker presented "Deep-learning-based seismic risk assessment and retrofitting of road networks" at the 2023 Pacific Earthquake Engineering Research Center Annual Meetingin Berkeley, California.
8/23/2023: Omar Issa and Jack Baker presented "Assessing Urban Post-Earthquake Community Recovery to Inform Pre-Disaster Planning" at the 2023 NIST-NSF Disaster Resilience Research Symposium.
7/12/2023: Emily Mongold presented "Using engineering models to compare social impacts of multiple hazards" at the 2023 Natural Hazards Center Researchers Meeting in Boulder, Colorado.
7/9/2023: Chenbo Wang and Rodrigo Costa presented "A Methodology to Estimate Post-disaster Unmet Housing Needs in the U.S. Using Limited Data," at the 14th International Conference on Applications of Statistics and Probability in Dublin, Ireland.
6/15/2023: Jack Baker presented "Spatial correlation in ground motion intensities: Measurement, prediction, and seismic risk implications," at the 49th Risk, Hazard and Uncertainty Workshop in Hydra, Greece.
6/12/2023: Jack Baker gave a plenary lecture, "Recent advances in ground motion selection for seismic analysis," at the 9th International Conference on Computational Methods in Structural Dynamics and Earthquake Engineering in Athens, Greece.
6/9/2023: Jack Baker spoke at the NHERI Graduate Student Council Academic Publishing Workshop. A link for free registration is here.
5/10/2023: Jack Baker gave a lecture, "Engineering disaster-resilient systems in an uncertain future," at the Sandia National Laboratories Bay Area Strategic Engagement Seminars (BASES) series.
4/30/2023: This page provides references and resources related to the 2023 William B. Joyner lecture, including a video of the lecture, cited papers, and related software tools.
4/26/2023: A new advice article on promoting classroom discussion has been posted.
4/19/2023: Jack Baker gave the William B. Joyner Lecture, "Spatial correlation in ground motion intensities: Measurement, prediction, and seismic risk implications," at the Seismological Society of America Annual Meeting, in San Juan, Puerto Rico.
4/12/2023: Jack Baker gave the William B. Joyner Lecture, "Spatial correlation in ground motion intensities: Measurement, prediction, and seismic risk implications," at the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute Annual Meeting, in San Francisco, California.
4/11/2023: Jack Baker and Sabine Loos will give an Effective Technical Presentations and Visual Communication Workshop for early career participans at the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute Annual Meeting, in San Francisco, California.
1/13/2023: Jack Baker posted a letter marking the start of his role as Editor-in-Chief of Earthquake Spectra.
1/12/2023: Congratulations to Corinne Bowers for being selected to the 2023 cohort of the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment Rising Environmental Leaders Program!