Kenneth R. Baker

Brief Biography

Kenneth R. Baker was born in Brookline, Massachusetts. He was named a Fellow of the Manufacturing and Service Operations Management (MSOM) Society in 2001 and a Fellow of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS) in 2004. He made significant contributions to scheduling, production planning, and spreadsheet modeling.

Baker studied engineering and applied physics at Harvard prior to pursuing graduate study in operations research at Cornell University. Under the guidance of Professor William L. Maxwell, he received a Ph.D. in operations research in 1969, accepting a position as an Assistant Professor of Industrial Engineering at the University of Michigan that year.  

Baker held a visiting appointment in Industrial Engineering at North Carolina State University starting in 1972 and joined the faculty of Business Administration at Duke University in 1973. In the 1970s and 1980s, Baker’s research and publications dealt with scheduling problems. He published his first textbook, Introduction to Sequencing and Scheduling (1974), which has since been revised and expanded three times, most recently in 2019, in collaboration with Dan Trietsch.

Baker joined Dartmouth College in 1979, where he was later appointed as the Nathaniel Leverone Professor of Management at the Tuck School of Business. At Tuck, he taught MBA courses in decision science, quality management, production planning, quantitative problem solving, and environmentally conscious manufacturing. In 1985, he and Dean Kropp published one of the first textbooks in management science to combine text and cases. Baker was also affiliated with Dartmouth’s Thayer School of Engineering, where he was Adjunct Professor of Engineering and served as co-Director of the Master of Engineering Management Program.

Baker held a number of editorial positions. In the early 1970s, he served as editor of the OR Division Newsletter of the Institute for Industrial Engineers (IIE) and was also on the editorial board of IIE Transactions. His other editorial positions have included Associate Editor for Management Science (1976-1982), Associate Editor for the Journal of Scheduling (1997-2004), Senior Editor of Manufacturing and Service Operations Management (1996-2002), and Founding Associate Editor for the International Journal of Planning and Scheduling (2011-2018).

Baker was a Principal Investigator of the Tuck School of Business’s Spreadsheet Engineering Research Program. With fellow Tuck Professor Stephen G. Powell, Baker co-wrote Management Science: The Art of Modeling with Spreadsheets (2004), providing students and analysts the technical knowledge and skills needed to develop real expertise in business modelling. The book was updated several times and most recently appeared in its fifth edition.  In 2006, he published a related text on the subject, Optimization Modeling with Spreadsheets, which most recently appeared in its third edition.