UW News

October 3, 2002

Donald Baker

When your doctor sends you for an ultrasound, you have this year’s Alumnus Summa Laude Dignatus to thank that he can use that technology to help him diagnose and treat illnesses. Donald Baker, a 1960 UW electrical engineering graduate, is the man responsible for turning ultrasound images from fuzzy and unreadable to the kind that clinicians can use.

Baker made his discovery while working in the laboratory of the late Robert Rushmer, founder of the UW Bioengineering department. The team there had a continuous wave Doppler ultrasound machine that didn’t provide the clear images needed. It was Baker who figured out that pulsed, not continuous sound waves were the answer. The research was published in 1967, and the rest is history.

But Baker wasn’t only involved in the creation of ultrasound machines. He also was very involved in getting the word out, developing a worldwide network of researchers and clinicians who could go out to teach physicians about the new diagnostic tool. And he was instrumental in establishing training programs for technicians here in the Puget Sound area.

No wonder, then, that Baker is being honored with an award given not for recent work but for a lifetime record. This is the highest honor the UW can bestow on a graduate.

Baker left the University in 1980 to join ATL, a manufacturer of ultrasound technology, as a consultant. He retired in 1985. Honored with the Joseph Homes Pioneer Award of the American Institute of Ultrasound, Baker is now looking forward to having his early inventions in the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History, where they will go on permanent display sometime this fall for the 40th anniversary of medical ultrasound.