A Tribute to Technical Excellence and Collaboration
This award proudly carries the name of Dr. Mary Baker in recognition of her lifetime achievements and her profound impact on the engineering community. The award celebrates engineering professionals whose careers exemplify the values Dr. Baker embodied, including technical excellence, innovative thinking, originality, and meaningful contributions to this field. Each year, TCVS honors a distinguished professional from industry, government, or academia whose work in vibration, acoustics, shock, or dynamics reflects a groundbreaking innovation, a career of impactful contributions, or meaningful collaboration across all sectors.
Click here to view past award recipients.
About Dr. Mary Baker
Dr. Mary Baker brought a lifetime of engineering excellence and leadership to ATA Engineering, which she co-founded and then led in various senior leadership roles until her passing in 2021.
Early in her career, Dr. Baker joined ATA’s predecessor, Structural Dynamics Research Corporation (SDRC), where she eventually went on to become Vice President of the Advanced Test and Analysis division. She led that team for most of its 24-year history before co-founding ATA Engineering through a friendly spinoff from SDRC in 2000.
Under Dr. Baker’s leadership over the next decades, ATA contributed to several landmark aerospace programs, including the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s Curiosity Mars rover mission (which earned ATA the 2012 George M. Low Award), the James Webb Space Telescope, and an array of advanced spacecraft, launch vehicles, rocket engines, and aircraft. Known for her innovation in computer simulation methods for solving structural mechanics problems, Dr. Baker authored more than fifty technical articles throughout her career and was an instrumental figure in the careers of hundreds of students, colleagues, and other engineers with whom she worked.
Dr. Baker promoted and practiced a visionary leadership philosophy that was refreshingly different from the prevailing conventions in industry. She insisted that ATA be 100% employee-owned from the outset; she was familiar with the benefits of that ownership model because of the employee profit-sharing and stock-purchase plan pioneered in 1899 by her grandfather, John S. Baker, at the Baker Manufacturing Company, and she saw that it eliminated conflicts between employees and owners, as they were one and the same.
Dr. Baker’s outstanding achievements earned her election to the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) and her recognition as a Caltech Distinguished Alumna in 2014. Dr. Baker also served as Chair of the External Advisory Board for Mechanical and Civil Engineering at Caltech, where she had obtained her M.S. and Ph.D. in Applied Mechanics. In addition, Dr. Baker was deeply involved in academic advisory roles at the University of California San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering and at the Department of Engineering Physics at her undergraduate alma mater, the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
View a photo collage of Dr. Baker’s professional accomplishments here.
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