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Professor Baird served for 42.5 years as faculty at Virginia Tech where he ended his career as the Alexander F. Giacco Professor of Chemical Engineering. He has received a number of awards and honors from Virginia Tech as well as technical societies. For example, he has received the Dean’s Awards for Excellence in Research and Teaching and all the top awards from the Society of Plastics Engineers (SPE) such as the International Award for Research (2003) and the International Award (2009). He has about 350 refereed publications and is the primary author (along with Dimitris Collias) of a textbook entitled Polymer Processing: Principles and Design (John Wiley and Sons) which has been in print for almost 30 years. He has 8 patents with a new patent recently issued concerned with generating novel composites for use in Fused Filament Fabrication (3D printing process). He has given about 135 invited lectures at universities, conferences, and companies. He has been involved with funding both as the PI and co-PI totaling more than $40,000,000 over his career. He was selected as a Fellow in three major technical societies including the American Institute of Chemical Engineers, the Society of Rheology, and SPE.  His expertise is in the application of non-Newtonian fluid mechanics to the design of novel polymer processing operations. He has mentored 53 PhD and 13 MS students to completion with approximately 8 of these being faculty or instructors at universities around the world. He still serves on the thesis committees of two students.