James Baker-Jarvis
James Roger Baker-Jarvis was an American applied physicist and metrologist who was a research scientist at the Electromagnetics Division at National Institute of Standards and Technology. He is best known for his contribution to the metrology of dielectric properties of materials in microwave frequencies.
Biography
James Roger Baker-Jarvis was born on February 8, 1950, in Lauderdale, Minnesota. He received B.S. degree in mathematics and M.S. degree in physics from University of Minnesota in 1975 and 1980, respectively. He pursued his doctoral studies in University of Wyoming and obtained a PhD. degree in theoretical physics in 1984. His post-doctoral work concerned dielectric measurements and electromagnetic fields in lossy media. Spending two years as an assistant professor at University of Wyoming, he then moved to North Dakota State University, where he was an assistant professor of physics and worked on electromagnetic heating processes and maximum entropy methods. In 1989, he joined National Institute of Standards and Technology, where he spent the remainder of his career and was the leader of Electromagnetic Properties of Materials Project.Baker-Jarvis' research work at NIST focused on microwave dielectric properties of materials and nondestructive evaluation. ASTM Standard 5568 for dielectric metrology techniques was largely based on his work on coaxial cable measurements. An iterative measurement technique measurement technique introduced by Baker-Jarvis and his colleagues is known as Baker-Jarvis algorithm or NIST iterative method. In 2010, he was named a fellow member of IEEE for "contributions to dielectric measurement and analysis of microwave measurement structures."
Baker-Jarvis was married to Karen Baker-Jarvis, with whom he met at University of Minnesota. They took on a hyphenated surname. He died on December 31, 2011, following an automobile accident, and was survived by his wife and two children.
Selected publications
;Journal articles*