Hello!
I’m Paul T Baker. I’m an assistant professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Widener University. I teach physics and study gravitational waves.
Before coming to Widener, I was a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Gravitational Waves and Cosmology at West Virginia University. I have also taught as a visiting assistant professor at SUNY Geneseo, a public liberal arts college that is home to one of the largest all undergrad physics departments in the country.
My research is mostly about on gravitational wave data analysis techniques. Particularly, I’m interested detecting and characterizing gravitational wave signals. I used to work on LIGO starting way back in 2007, when I was a graduate student. More recently have been working on detecting gravitational waves with pulsar timing arrays (PTA). I’m a member of NANOGrav, the North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational waves, which seeks to detect low frequecy gravitational waves by timing radio pulsars. NANOGrav is one of four PTAs that jointly form the International Pulsar Timing Array.
Over my life, I’ve lived in New York, Pennsylvania, Oregon, Montana, West Virginia, and Delaware. The banner photo is a view down Porcupine Rd from my favorite forest service cabin in the Crazy Mountains north of Livingston, Montana.