Baker Research Group

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, the 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.

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Curriculum Vitae

News

9/16/2024: Jack Baker was reappointed to another term on the Steering Committee of the U.S. Geological Survey National Seismic Hazard Model.

9/13/2024: Jack Baker was quoted in this article on the Naval Postgraduate School and Stanford Climate Security Fellows, related to his work as a faculty advisor for the program.

9/5/2024: Congratulations to Omar Issa for completing his Ph.D. thesis, Engineering modeling for assessing and optimizing earthquake resilience! He is now a co-founder at ResiQuant.

8/26/2024: A new advice article on Building and maintaining your CV has been posted.

8/21/2024: Congratulations to Neetesh Sharma for completing his time as a Postdoctoral Scholar! He has now joined the FAMU-FSU College of Engineering as an Assistant Professor.

8/20/2024: Jack Baker was profiled as an Engineer/Innovator in the Structural Engineers Association of Northern California Hensolt SEAONC Legacy project. Profile here.

8/20/2024: Jack Baker gave a presentation, "Assessing Urban Post-Earthquake Community Recovery to Inform Pre-Disaster Planning," at the 2024 NIST-NSF Disaster Resilience Research Symposium.

8/19/2024: A new advice article on Developing a winning mindset when applying for research funding (with Brendon Bradley as lead author) has been posted.

8/12/2024: A new advice article on paper authorship has been posted.

7/29/2024: Jack Baker gave a talk, "Engineering disaster-resilient systems in an uncertain future: The Doerr School of Sustainability and Stanford Urban Resilience Initiative", at the Japan-US Research Collaboration Week 2024 on the Stanford Campus.

7/18/2024: A new advice article on Five reasons journals reject papers (and how to avoid them) has been posted.

6/29/2024: Earthquake Spectra has launched a new policy to require sharing of research data, and strongly encourage staring of code, by default. Journal Editor-in-Chief Jack Baker coauthored an opinion paper explaining this policy.

6/26/2024: The Baker Group is associated with 14 presentations at the 14th World Conference on Earthquake Engineering in Milan, Italy.

6/10/2024: A new advice article on Presenting at a conference has been posted.

6/1/2024: Emily Mongold was selected as a Partnerships for Climate Justice in the Bay Area 2024 Summer Fellow, to continue her work with OneShoreline on liquefaction risk to flood protection infrastructure.

6/10/2024: An updated advice article on Attending a conference has been posted.

5/20/2024: A new advice article on Writing your paper: materials and methods section (written with Mark Denavit, Erica Fischer, and Matthew Eatherton) has been posted.

4/11/2024: Jack Baker and Neetesh Sharma were contributors to the new GeoHazards-International-led product, Next Generation Scenarios Guidance.

4/11/2024: Jack Baker and Neetesh Sharma were coauthors on the Geohazards-International-led poster, "Advancing the Use of Scenarios in Mitigating Earthquake Risk," at the 2024 Earthquake Engineering Research Institute Annual Meeting in Seattle.

2/14/2024: Jack Baker gave a presentation, "Risk analysis for climate change problems," for the Naval Postgraduate School-Stanford Climate Security Fellows program.

2/14/2024: Jack Baker gave a presentation, "Spatial correlation in ground motion intensities: Measurement, prediction, and seismic risk implications," at the USGS Earthquake Science Center Seminar series.

2/1/2024: Omar Issa, Neetesh Sharma, and Jack Baker gave presentations for the 2024 NHERI Computational Symposium at the University of California, Los Angeles.

1/24/2024: Emily Mongold gave a presentation, "Probabilistic regional liquefaction hazard and risk analysis: A case study of residential buildings in Alameda, CA," at the USGS Earthquake Science Center Seminar series.

1/19/2024: Congratulations to Corinne Bowers for her new Science Advances paper "Temporal compounding increases economic impacts of atmospheric rivers in California." This work and her related paper on Atmospheric River Sequences was highlighted by the Washington Post, Reuters, the San Francisco ChronicleNBC Bay Area, The GuardianNBC Climate in Crisis, Earth.com, the Santa Rosa Press Democrat, The Conversation, and Stanford News.

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Jack Baker