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Joel Baker, Ph.D.

Director, PI

Environmental Chemistry and Engineering


(253) 254.7030

jebaker@uw.edu

Professor Joel Baker holds the Port of Tacoma Chair in Civil Engineering at the University of Washington Tacoma, is the Director of the UW Puget Sound Institute, and serves as the Science Director of the Center for Urban Waters. He earned a B.S. degree in Environmental Chemistry from SUNY Syracuse (1982) and M.S. (1985) and Ph.D. (1988) degrees in Civil and Environmental Engineering from the University of Minnesota.  Between 1998 and 2007 he was a member of the faculty at the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science, where he led a research program focused on the fate and transport of organic pollutants in the Chesapeake Bay.  Dr. Baker moved to the University of Washington in 2008 to work with the Tacoma community to establish the Center for Urban Waters

Dr. Baker’s research interests center about the transport of organic contaminants in the environment, especially in urban estuaries.  His group has conducted pioneering studies identifying the importance of air-sea pollutant exchange, modeling exposure and bioaccumulation in aquatic food webs, using chemical fingerprints to identify pollutant sources, and discovering degradation pathways for brominated flame retardants.  Since 2010, Dr. Baker has lead the Puget Sound Institute, a boundary-spanning research organization that serves as the science center for the Puget Sound restoration program.

Dr. Baker has co-authored over one hundred papers on contaminant cycling in the Great Lakes, the Chesapeake Bay, Puget Sound and other coastal waters.  He was the lead author on a scientific review of PCBs in the Hudson River, a contributing author to the Pew Oceans Commission report Marine Pollution in the United States, and a member of the NRC’s Committee on Oil in the Sea, chaired the New York Harbor Model Evaluation Group, advised the European Commission on water quality modeling, and served on the Board of Directors of the Society of Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry. Dr. Baker is an ex officio member of the Puget Sound Partnership Science Panel, which he chaired from 2007-2009.  In 2023 he was elected to the Washington State Academy of Science.

www.linkedin.com/in/joel-baker-75aa7118

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9980-7781