Jack Baker is the William Alden Campbell and Martha Campbell Professor of Engineering and a professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering 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, effects of climate change on disaster risk, 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.
5/28/2026: Gaby Calana, Simona Meiler, Nikola Blagojevic, and Tinger Zhu presented their research at the 2026 NHERI SimCenter Computational Symposium at UC Berkeley.
5/22/2026: Jack Baker will be hosting a free peer review workshop at the 13th National Conference on Earthquake Engineering. Workshop content is drawn from his forthcoming book, Communication by Design: An Engineer's Guide to Sharing Your Research. Signed copies will be available for purchase at the workshop.
5/7/2026: Simona Meiler presented "Who bears the risk? Stress-testing insurance system stability under evolving risks" and "Extending tropical cyclone risk assessment through recovery simulations" at the EGU General Assembly 2026.
4/22/2026: Simona Meiler's preprint on stress testing catastrophe insurance market stability under climate risk was featured in a Financial Times article.
4/20/2026: Jack Baker's new book, Communication by Design, is now available for pre-order! See the book's landing page for more information and sign up to recieve a free sample chapter.
3/13/2026: Jack Baker and Simona Meiler were awarded a Discovery Grant for their project, "Dimensions of climate risk uncertainty."
1/27/2026: Jack Baker visited the Eastside College Preparatory School's Environmental Club, to discuss disaster resilience research and careers.
1/20/2026: Jack Baker presented "Recent Advances in Disaster Resilience Assessment" at the 2026 Aichi Prefecture International Performance Based Engineering Symposium in Japan.
1/5/2026: Congratulations to Nicole Paul for being awarded the 2025 EERI Shah Family Innovation Prize, "in recognition of her groundbreaking research contributions bridging engineering, social science, and data analytics"!
