Betsy Baker

How Marine Science Changed My Life: One Lawyer’s Story

About the Speaker

Betsy Baker is Executive Director of the North Pacific Research Board in Anchorage, Alaska. Prior to joining NPRB in November 2016, Dr. Baker was a professor of international, ocean, and environmental law at Vermont Law School.  In her decade at VLS, Baker served as Visiting Scholar with the State Department's inter-agency Extended Continental Shelf Task Force in 2012-13, a science crew member on the U.S. Coast Guard icebreaker Healy for two Arctic extended continental shelf mapping deployments in 2008-2009, and a Research Fellow in the Institute of Arctic Studies at Dartmouth College in 2010. Her research and policy work has included projects for the Alaska Arctic Policy Commission, the Inuit Circumpolar Council-Alaska, NOAA’s National Marine Fisheries Service Alaska Region Office, the Ocean Conservancy, the PAME working group of the Arctic Council, and Statoil/DNV. Her board memberships include the Science Steering Committee of SEARCH (The Study of Arctic Environmental Change) and the Polar Research Board of the National Academy of Sciences. Baker received her J.D. from Michigan and her LL.M. and doctorate in law from Christian-Albrechts University in Kiel, Germany, where she was an Alexander von Humboldt Chancellor's Fellow. She has taught at Harvard, Minnesota and Vermont Law Schools.