Susan P. Baker M.P.H.

Susan P. Baker, MPH, dedicated her professional life to bringing awareness of the importance of injury prevention practices to the forefront through meaningful public policy for the citizens of Maryland, the United States, and the world.

Baker became a professor, later professor emeritus, and associate chair of the Department of Health Policy and Management of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health (BSPH), along with a joint appointment in Environmental Health Sciences, in 1975. She also held joint appointments at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in the Departments of Pediatrics and Emergency Medicine.

Baker's many years in the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner of Maryland provided a fruitful link between forensic pathology and her specialty of injury epidemiology. Her early research attracted national attention and fostered the development of trauma centers because it showed the crucial importance of transporting seriously injured patients to hospitals that have the equipment and trained personnel needed to treat such injuries, rather than merely to the nearest hospital, as was common in the 1960s and 1970s.

Baker's discovery that children, during the first year of life, die in motor vehicles at rates far higher than any other age group was a major influence on the creation of child seat belt laws throughout the United States. Her meticulous research findings helped convince state legislators across the country to pass laws requiring the use of infant and child restraints.

One of her most important leadership roles was as vice chairman of the Committee on Trauma of the National Academy of Sciences. A major force in the development and writing of the landmark Injury in America: A Continuing Public Health Problem (1985), Baker helped carry to the press and Congress the book's urgent message that trauma is a sorely neglected problem of immense and costly dimensions. Congress responded to the committee's recommendations by establishing a locus for injury control in the Centers for Disease Control, funding centers of excellence, and major research projects across the nation. Baker and BSPH were awarded one of these centers.

In 1987, Baker became the founder and first director of the Center for Injury Research and Policy at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, where a public health approach is used to identify injury risk factors and then to design, implement, and evaluate prevention and rehabilitation programs. She developed the widely used Injury Severity Score. Studies she conducted in the late 1990s and early 2000s included the relationship between the risk of an accident and the number of people in cars driven by teenagers, which spurred the State of Maryland and other states across the nation to fashion tougher graduated licensing systems for teen drivers.

Other groundbreaking research by Baker addressed such topics as the role of cigarettes in the house-fire deaths of nonsmokers; the relationship between alcohol and homicide; the use of drugs and medications in adolescent suicide; the prevention of injuries on Indian reservations; the etiology of falls in nursing homes; the epidemiology of fatal occupational injuries; and geographic variations in mortality.

An important focus of Baker’s efforts centers on the training and encouragement of students and colleagues throughout the world. She instituted new injury-control courses and spurred students to address challenging prevention problems and research questions at Johns Hopkins, the University of Minnesota, and the World Health Organization.

Baker received numerous honors, including the Prince Bernhard Medal for Distinguished Research, the Association for the Advancement of Automotive Medicine's Award of Merit, the American Trauma Society's Distinguished Achievement Award, Johns Hopkins' Distinguished Alumnus Award, and an honorary Doctor of Science degree from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. In 2010, she received the Frank A. Calderone Prize, the preeminent award in the field of public health, from the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health.

Baker married Timothy Danforth Baker (1925-2013), a founder and former professor of the study of international health at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. They had three children together.

"I looked at the chain of events that led to the injury and how you could interrupt that chain. I looked for the weakest link and saw what you could do about that." - Baker in a 2014 interview with Mat Edelson.