Yale University professor Keith Baker said he credits his teachers from elementary school to his post-graduate studies with providing the encouragement that led to the groundbreaking research he has conducted in particle physics, including being part of the team that discovered what has been called the God particle.
Baker, who holds degrees from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Stanford University, now divides his time between teaching at Yale University in New Haven, Conn., and performing further experiments at the Large Hadron Collider, the world's largest particle accelerator, in Geneva.
It all began with his first-grade teacher, Mamie Hale, in the tiny Delta town of Tillar, population 225, Baker said.
"Early on in my education I got validation," he said. "I got validation from my teachers, even in elementary school in Tillar. I valued the personal touch, from both white and black teachers, I got early on."
Baker will speak at Philander Smith College on Wednesday as part of a lecture series aimed at fostering an interest in mathematics and science, fields in which minorities are underrepresented.
The Arkansas Mentoring and Networking Association's Fourth Distinguished STEM Lecture Series will be held at 11 a.m. in the M.L. Harris Auditorium of the private historically black liberal arts school at 900 W. Daisy L. Bates Drive. STEM is an acronym for science, technology, engineering and mathematics. The lecture is free and open to the public.
"We are excited to provide Arkansas students the opportunity to meet and hear from such a distinguished scholar, physicist, and writer as Dr. Baker," said Al Ashley, a former staff member at Stanford Linear Accelerator Center and the association's president and chairman. "This is as significant to our students as it was when Nobel Laureate Burton Richter lectured here at Philander Smith College in ... 2010."
Baker was born in McGehee in 1959 and remained in Arkansas through the sixth grade before his family moved to Memphis. His parents, Oliver and Yvonne Baker, eventually returned to Arkansas, he said. He returns to the state about once a year to visit siblings and other relatives in Tillar, Pine Bluff and Little Rock.
"My roots are in Arkansas," Baker said. "My home is Arkansas."
He also has found a home in the laboratory, in no small part thanks to his parents. They met at what is now the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff, where Baker's father studied chemistry and his mother studied music.
He credited both with sparking his interest in learning and instilling in him, through piano lessons, the discipline to succeed in the classroom.
After graduating with a bachelor of science degree in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1981, Baker enrolled at Stanford University, where he received masters of science degrees in physics and mathematics in 1984 and a doctoral degree in physics in 1987. Baker pursued post-doctoral research at the Los Alamos National Laboratory.
Baker eventually joined the faculty of the physics department at Hampton University as an assistant professor with a concurrent appointment as a staff scientist at the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility. He was soon promoted to full professor in the physics department before being named as the University Endowed Professor of Physics.
Baker was appointed a physics professor at Yale in 2006, the same year he was named to the Arkansas Black Hall of Fame. Four years later, he became director of the school's A.W. Wright Nuclear Structure Laboratory.
His research centers on the standard model of particle physics, which explains how the basic building blocks of matter interact. Those building blocks form the foundation for atoms and their nuclei, which together form molecules, which in turn come together to form DNA, the hereditary material in humans and almost all other organisms.
Baker called the standard model "the most successful theory ever developed" and the "crowning achievement of 20th century physics." But calculations using the standard model left those building blocks, called elementary particles, with no mass."At some level, all particles have mass," he said.
That led to a worldwide collaboration of scientists, engineers and computing power to search for the answer at the Large Hadron Collider, which uses a 16.7-mile long underground ring of superconducting magnets with several accelerating structures to boost the energy of particles along the way. Inside the accelerator, two high-energy particle beams travel at close to the speed of light before they are made to collide.
That effort led to the discovery in 2012 of a new subatomic particle consistent with the Higgs boson, which was predicted in the standard model. The 2013 Nobel prize in physics was awarded jointly to Francois Englert and Peter Higgs "for the theoretical discovery of a mechanism that contributes to our understanding of the origin of mass of subatomic particles."
Baker was part of a team of 7,000 scientists around the world who collaborated on the effort. "I was only one of 7,000 but it was a wonderful experience."
But the discovery is a new beginning for Baker and other scientists pondering the origins of the universe. Baker said he is focusing on dark matter, which is five to six times more prevalent than the matter that make up the stars and galaxies. The standard model doesn't explain that, nor does it explain why the universe is not only expanding but accelerating when equations suggest it should be slowing down, he said.
Baker has a team that includes two post-doctoral fellows, three graduate students and one undergraduate who are helping him "build a detector" that can look for "evidence of a dark sector" of the universe.
The Arkansas Mentoring and Networking Association describes itself as the only nonprofit organization in Arkansas "targeting, growing and engaging" minority-group students "in a program that includes mentoring, networking and paid internships" in STEM fields.
Since its founding in 2004, more than 2,000 Arkansas students have participated in the organization's activities. It places high school and college students in internships and research positions at major universities and national laboratories and in science fellowships, the majority at Stanford University's National Accelerator Laboratory in Menlo Park, Calif.
More information about Baker's lecture is available from Ashley at (501) 223-3477.
Metro on 11/07/2016