From the January 2012 "NIST Connections" Newsletter

Jim Baker-Jarvis and his wife
navigating the Brown's Canyon
Zoom-Flume Rapids.

(Photo courtesy of
Baker-Jarvis family)

Obituary:

James Baker-Jarvis

Written by James Burrus

James Roger Baker-Jarvis, a two-time Bronze Medal winner who worked in the Boulder Labs Electromagnet­ics Division of the Physical Measurement Laboratory, died shortly after noon on New Year’s Eve while driving with his wife, Karen, on the North Foothills Highway north of Boulder. High winds blew a tree branch about 3 feet long and 3 inches in diameter through the windshield, strik­ing Baker-Jarvis in the chest. He was able to steer his car to the side of the road and stop before losing consciousness. He was 61.

An avid outdoorsman, Baker-Jarvis is remembered by his wife and children as a spontaneous man who dreamed of riding across the United States on a bike and who was always thinking about work. “Every­thing, all over the house, had equations written on it; receipts, envelopes, maga­zines,” Karen says.

Among his prized possessions were his chainsaw, which he used to keep the pine trees trimmed and thinned on their 40 acres of land near Rabbit Mountain in northern Boulder County, and his black lab, Sadie, who would sit with him outdoors in the winter as he burned the branches from the trees.

His son, Duff, and daughter, Aquene, both college aged, remember using their father’s climbing ropes to belay him as he worked on the 45-degree roof of their home. A climber and hunter, Baker-Jarvis last year shot a deer and an elk on his property for food. A thrifty man, he was fond of buying clothes and gear, including a pair of oversized women’s sunglasses, at Goodwill.

He and his wife were expert canoeists and were white-water river instructors and members of the Rocky Mountain Canoe Club. Among their paddling conquests were the Class IV and V rapids of West­water Canyon on the Colorado River, the San Juan River in New Mexico (his favor­ite), and the Desolation and Gray canyons in Utah. Once a year Baker-Jarvis and his family would head to Saskatchewan and northern Ontario for two weeks of canoe expeditions.

Karen said her husband would read vo­raciously at home about everything from quantum physics to micro electromagne­tism, and inevitably head to work the next day excited about what he had learned. This was reflected in the more than 50 papers he wrote since coming to NIST in 1989, on such diverse topics as physics, dielectric and magnetic measurements, and fracture theory. In 2010, Baker-Jarvis was named a Fellow of IEEE.

In addition to his wife and two chil­dren, Baker-Jarvis is survived by nine brothers and sisters.