Jim Baker is currently the Director of Technology and Economic Development at Michigan Technological University. Jim's current responsibilities include handling University inventions from disclosure, through patenting, and ultimately licensing. He also works on negotiating terms for sponsored research contracts, non-disclosure agreements, material transfer agreements, and other related agreements with industrial partners and interacts regularly with the MTEC SmartZone on regional economic development initiatives.

Jim also served for previously as the Acting Director of the Michigan SmartCel Business Accelerator housed at Michigan Tech and prior to working in university technology transfer, he held positions in the engineering and information technology fields including the General Director of ChemAlliance, an online compliance assistance center for the chemical industry (www.chemalliance.org) , Program Manager of the National Center for Clean Industrial and Treatment Technologies, and a product engineer/manager for the Clean Process Advisory System (CPAS) under the National Center for Clean Industrial and Treatment Technologies. Jim has also done private consulting in the environmental field and has held sales and management positions in the consumer electronics industry.

Jim is a registered Patent Agent and holds a B.S. in Environmental Engineering, an M.S. in Civil Engineering and a Ph.D. in Environmental Engineering from Michigan Technological University. He has been Principle or Co-Priciple Investigator on more than $6 million in sponsored research, authored over 20 works in the area of chemical properties and pollution prevention, and was a delegate to a NATO Scientific and Environmental Affairs Division Workshop on Tools and Methods for Pollution Prevention in Prague, Czech Republic in 1998.