Biography

Dr. Baird has enjoyed a life-long interest in physics, teaching and research. He has experienced a variety of work environments, from commercial enterprises to academic laboratories and the classroom. He was born and raised in Belmont, Massachusetts where he developed a love of science.

Undergraduate Education

Dr. Baird graduated with a B.S. in Physics from Brigham Young University (BYU). While at BYU, he was active in the honors program and service organizations. At BYU, he was part of a computational biology research team and studied the dynamics of gramicidin ion channels using computational codes. Through a research course, Dr. Baird later built a photonic band-gap structure and demonstrated its band-gap properties. During this time, he also served a two-year, full-time church service mission in Germany. He graduated from BYU with a minor in Mathematics and an emphasis on Computer Science. While at BYU, Dr. Baird met and married his wife Ellen, who graduated from BYU with a degree in nursing.

Commercial Innovation

After graduation, Dr. Baird was hired as a professional web developer for ZServe Corporation, a small online startup company. He was active in creating new features and products for online communities. This involved enterprise-level programming of back-end systems and analysis of data flow.

Graduate Education

Dr. Baird received his Ph.D. in theoretical physics from the University of Massachusetts Lowell with an emphasis on electromagnetic scattering. He studied the use of the Euler parameters to better represent the phenomenological scattering properties of objects. Dr. Baird optimized the Euler parameters by weighting scattering centers according to their persistence. For his Ph.D. dissertation, Dr. Baird designed and built an Automatic Target Recognition (ATR) system based on the optimized Euler parameters.

Professional Employment

Upon graduating, Dr. Baird was hired as a senior research scientist by the Submillimeter-Wave Technology Laboratory at the University of Massachusetts Lowell and as an instructor for both core graduate electromagnetics courses at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. For the next eight years at UMass Lowell he mentored several students in their undergraduate and graduate research, published many research papers, served on various academic committees, and continued to teach the graduate electromagnetism courses. In 2016, Dr. Baird was hired as a tenure-track Assistant Professor of Physics at West Texas A&M University. In 2022, Dr. Baird won tenure and was promoted to the rank of Associate Professor of Physics at West Texas A&M University. While at West Texas A&M University, he has taught various undergraduate physics classes and continued his computational research of quantum structures.

Personal Life

Dr. Baird and his wife currently have seven children. Their two oldest children have reached adulthood and left for college and church missions. Dr. Baird and his wife have been actively engaged in the fostering community and have fostered two children. They homeschool their children and are active in homeschooling organizations. Dr. Baird's wife teaches high school science classes at a homeschooling cooperative organization.