BAKER, G(eorge) W(alter) 1915-2003

OBITUARY NOTICE—See index for CA sketch: Born June 15, 1915, in Seaford, DE; died of renal failure March 19, 2003, in Chevy Chase, MD. Sociologist and author. Baker was best known for his research on how societies react to disasters and related stressful situations. He earned his A.B. degree from the University of Delaware in 1939 and his M.A. in 1947 and Ph.D. in 1952 from the University of North Carolina. After working for three years as a high school teacher, Baker served in the U.S. Army during World War II and participated in the Okinawa campaign. He then returned to teaching briefly before joining the Human Resources Research Institute at Maxwell Air Force Base as a project officer in 1951, becoming program officer in 1953. During the 1950s he was also a senior scientist with the Air Force Personnel and Training Research Center in Texas and team chairman at the Special Operations Research Office of American University. From 1959 to 1963 he was technical director of the Disaster Research Group for the National Academy of Sciences-National Research Council. He spent the remainder of his career at the National Science Foundation in Washington, D.C., where from 1963 to 1978 he conducted disaster research, becoming program manager of Research Applied to National Needs in 1971. Baker was the coeditor of Symposium on Human Problems in the Utilization of Fallout Shelters (1960), Behavioral Scienceand Civil Defense (1962), and Man and Society in Disaster (1962), as well as coauthor of The Occasion Instant: The Structure of Social Responses to Unanticipated Air Raid Warnings (1961).

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Washington Post, April 1, 2003, p. B6.