Dr. Erich Baker started his education at the University of Notre Dame. He earned a B.A. in Political Science. He then continued his education receiving a M.S. in Biomedical Science from Barry University. Dr. Baker completed his education at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville where he earned his PhD in Comparative and Experimental Medicine.

Before coming to Baylor, he was an instructor at the University of Tennessee. In 2002, he joined the Baylor Department of Computer Science as an assistant professor in Bioinformatics.

He has over 30 published journals, abstracts, and presentations. He has also developed software, which includes:

• Mutrack – An integrated on-line distributed data system for discovery of novel phenotypes in mutagenized mice.

• GeneKeyDB – A lightweight metadata database representing collected data from community resources, including NCBI, Ensembl, and SwissProt

• ReunitingFamilies – A distributed on-line environment connecting physical and molecular forensic data with missing persons in the US and Mexico

• BuildeRDF – An on-line database that manages distributed data in XML/RDF formats

• MOMA – A proprietary distributed LIMS for tracking SNP data in molecular forensic laboratories.

Dr. Baker continues to drive the direction of research in bioinformatics. He has received many grants, including one that is in conjunction with the Bioinformatics Core of the Tennessee Mouse Genome Consortium. The grant is to be spread out over several years for a total of $1.5 million.