Germany, and the Sorbonne in Paris be- fore heading off to Irvine, California. By the time his Nobel was announced, he was then at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, but he had worked at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory as well as at MIT, where he held joint appoint- ments in the Department of Earth Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences and the Department of Chemistry until 2004. Then he joined the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at the University of California-San Diego and the Center for Atmospheric Research at the Scripps Institution of Oceanog- raphy.
Imaging a New World
oped the X-ray reflection microscope, and opened a new world to medical research. The principles they developed still are used in X-ray astronomy as well as in medicine.
Re-introducing a Hero
HE&IT was the founding sponsor of the Hispanic Engineer National Achieve- ment Awards in 1990, and the Lifetime Achievement it awarded to Dr. Baez reawakened interest in the Hispanic community in the accomplishments of this world-class scientist.
Albert Baez
Albert Baez was born in 1912, when America’s Hispanic population was even less visible. The western expansion of the 1800s had brought many former citizens of Mexico into the states of the American Southwest, but the Census did not recognize Spanish-speakers as a separate category. Dr. Baez, born in Puebla, Mexico and raised in Brooklyn, N.Y., earned his B.S. in mathematics from Drew University, and continued on to get his Master of Science degree from Syracuse. He completed his doctorate in physics at Stanford University, and taught physics at Stanford and several other institutions.
Medicine was at a crossroads during the middle of the 20th Century. World War II had produced a whirlwind of new surgical techniques and therapeu- tic approaches, but physicians’ ability to look closely into the processes of cellular life was sharply limited by a lack of instruments capable of imaging the cellular structure. Then, in 1948, Dr. Baez, still in graduate school, and his professor Paul Kirkpatrick, devel-
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Dr. Baez did not halt his journey of discovery after he completed his gradu- ate studies in 1950. His development of zone plates – concentric circles of alternating opaque and transparent materials – to use diffraction instead of refraction in the focusing of X-rays was a revolutionary advance so far ahead of its time that medical science had no use for it at the time. Later, when it became clear that the “waste” X-rays produced by cyclotron atom-smashers, now known as “synchrotron radiation,” could be used for medical therapies, scientists found Dr. Baez’ pioneering work still pertinent, decades after his discoveries.
Dr. Baez, the father of two famous daughters, folk-signers and peace activists Joan Baez and Mimi Fariña, and their sister Pauline, could have had a high-profile career in the military- industrial complex during the Cold War years of the 1950s and ‘60s. But Albert Baez, a Quaker, was a pacifist, and he devoted much of his career to humani- tarian pursuits. From 1950-’56, he held a faculty position at the University of the Redlands, including a yearlong stint with UNESCO, moving his family to Baghdad to establish the physics department of Baghdad University. In 1959, Dr. Baez joined the faculty at MIT, and a year later, he worked with the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observa- tory to develop the optics for an X-ray telescope.
A Commitment to Service
Next, Dr. Baez moved to Harvey Mudd College in Claremont, California, and in 1961, he began a six-year stint direct- ing science teaching for UNESCO in Paris. He published the textbook, The New College Physics: A Spiral Approach,
in 1967, and co-authored The Envi- ronment and Science and Technology Education in 1987. The next year, he wrote the memoir A Year in Baghdad. And if that was not enough, Dr. Baez made nearly 100 science films for the Encyclopaedia Brittanica Educational Corp. between 1967 and 1974. He also chaired the Commission on Education of the International Union for Conserva- tion of Nature and Natural Resources from 1979 to 1983.
In the Hispanic community, Dr. Baez was better known for his work with Vi- vamos Mejor/USA, the organization he founded in 1988 to help improve life in poor communities in Mexico. Vivamos Mejor developed projects in pre-school education, environmental remediation, and community activities. In 1991, Dr. Baez and Professor Kirkpatrick were rec- ognized by the International Society for Optical Engineering for their pioneering development of X-ray imaging micro- scopes and telescopes, and in 1995 the Hispanic Engineer National Achieve- ment Awards Conference established the Albert Baez Award for Technical Excellence and Service to Humanity. Three years later, it named him to the HENAAC Hall of Fame.
Dr. Baez died of natural causes in March 2007.
Finding her Future in Glass
Dr. Lina Echeverria first appeared in HE&IT in 1999, when she won a Woman of Color Technol- ogy Award for her work as Core Technology di- rector of Glass & Glass Ceramics products at Corning Corporation. She had gotten there by a curious route.
In 1969, Echeverria became the first woman to be ac- cepted into the geological engineering program at the Escuela Nacio- nal de Minas at the Universidad Colom- bia, her country’s largest public univer- sity. The young Lina Ech-
Dr. Lina Echeverria HISPANIC ENGINEER & Information Technology | 2010 47
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