Daniel N. Baker

Director,  Colorado Space Policy Center

Daniel N. Baker is Director of the Colorado Space Policy Center at the University of Colorado Boulder. He is also a Distinguished Professor of Planetary and Space Physics at CU Boulder. 

Baker studied under Prof. James A. Van Allen and subsequently worked with Prof. Edward C. Stone at the California Institute of Technology. He was Group Leader for Space Plasma Physics at Los Alamos National Laboratory (1981-1987) and then was Laboratory Chief at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. He directed the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP) at CU Boulder through 2024. 

Baker is a lead investigator on NASA missions including the Magnetospheric Multiscale (MMS) mission and the Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe (IMAP). He chaired the U. S. National Academy 2013-2022 Decadal Survey in Solar and Space Physics. He has edited nine books and published over 1000 refereed research papers (h-index=135, with over 60,000 citations). 

He is a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union, the International Academy of Astronautics, the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering. 

Baker also was the 2010 winner of the AIAA James Van Allen Space Environments Medal. In 2015, Baker was chosen as the Vikram A. Sarabhai Professor of the Indian Physical Research Laboratory. He also received the Shen Kuo Medal of IAGA (2015), the Colorado Governor’s Award for High-Impact Research related to his Space Weather research (2016), the William Bowie Medal of the American Geophysical Union (2018), the Hannes Alfven Medal of the European Geosciences Union (2019), and the Jeoujang Jaw Medal of COSPAR (2024).