Jack Baker is the William Alden Campbell and Martha Campbell Professor of Engineering, and Associate Dean for Faculty Affairs in the Doerr School of Sustainability, at Stanford University. 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. This work has influenced building codes, performance-based engineering guidelines, and catastrophe risk models. 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 joining Stanford in 2006, 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, 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.
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4/5/2025: Jack Baker was quoted in a Yale Climate Connections article on enhancing urban resilience.
3/28/2025: Jack Baker gave seminars on ground motion selection and performance-based engineering at Kobori Research Complex, Nagoya University, and the Architectural Institute of Japan (AIJ) Committee on Performance-Based Earthquake Engineering.
3/27/2025: Nicole Paul's recent paper on predicting household displacement after disasters was highlighted by the NHERI SimCenter for its use of SimCenter software and data.
3/7/2025: Nicole Paul spoke about household displacement and return after disasters in a special webinar hosted by the Technical Committee on Disaster Risk Management of the World Federation of Engineering Organizations (WFEO) and the Peruvian Engineers Association (CIP).
2/6/2025: Nikola Blagojevic, Gaby Calana, Simona Meiler, Emily Mongold, Tinger Zhu, and Jack Baker gave presentations at the 2025 NHERI SimCenter Computational Symposium at UCLA.
1/1/2025: Jack Baker was appointed as the William Alden Campbell and Martha Campbell Professor in the Stanford School of Engineering.
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