Dr. Scott Baker leads the Functional and Systems Biology Science Area for the Environmental Molecular Science Laboratory, a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) National User Facility located at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, Washington. His research interests include biotechnology, genomics and genetics, especially as they relate to fungal metabolite production, enzyme secretion and cell morphology.

Baker has a joint appointment as a fungal biotechnology scientist with the DOE Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI). For more than a decade he has led and contributed to fungal genome projects—from single genomes to resequencing of classical genetic mutant strains to whole fungal genus sequencing efforts. In 2009 and 2010, with DOE Joint Genome Institute (JGI) staff members, he co-led the development and launch of the JGI Fungal Genomics Program.

Baker has served on the Board of Directors of the Society for Industrial Microbiology and Biotechnology (SIMB) as both a Director and President.