In honor of Hispanic Heritage Month 2025, the Challenger Center has announced that it will highlight several Hispanic American STEM pioneers whose remarkable achievements and innovations have benefited humanity. Today’s social media post features Franklin Chang-Díaz, Ellen Ochoa, and Albert Vinicio Báez.
In 1991, Albert Báez (1912-2007) was featured on the cover of Hispanic Engineer magazine.
That same year, he and Paul Kirkpatrick received the Dennis Gabor Award from the International Society for Optical Engineering for their pioneering contributions to the development of X-ray imaging microscopes and X-ray imaging telescopes.
In 1995, the Hispanic Engineer National Achievement Awards Corporation (HENAAC) established the Albert V. Báez Award for Technical Excellence and Service to Humanity, and Báez was inducted into the HENAAC Hall of Fame in 1998.
While still a graduate student at Stanford, Báez developed concentric circles made of alternating opaque and transparent materials to focus X-rays through diffraction, rather than refraction.
These zone plates proved helpful and even essential decades later.
In 1948, he co-invented the X-ray reflection microscope with his doctoral advisor, Paul Kirkpatrick, which remains in use in medicine today.
Báez received his Ph.D. in Physics from Stanford in 1950, writing his thesis titled “Principles of X-Ray Optics and the Development of a Single State X-Ray Microscope.”
From 1950 to 1956, Baez held a professorship at the University of Redlands, where he continued his research on X-rays.
In 1951, he took a one-year leave of absence to work with UNESCO.
He returned to Stanford in 1956 and began collaborating with Jerrold R. Zacharias on the Physics Science Study Committee, an initiative aimed at reshaping high school physics education. In 1959, Baez accepted a faculty position at MIT and moved his family to the Boston area, where he focused on producing educational films related to physics.
In 1960, while working with the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge, Báez developed optics for an X-ray telescope.
Later that year, he relocated his family to Claremont, California, and joined the faculty at Harvey Mudd College.
From 1961 to 1967, he served as the first director of the UNESCO Science Education Program in Paris, helping to develop projects in the basic sciences across Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Arab states.
Báez authored the textbook “The New College Physics: A Spiral Approach” (1967) and was a co-author of “The Environment and Science and Technology Education” (1987). He produced nearly one hundred physics films for the Encyclopedia Britannica Educational Corporation from 1967 to 1974.
Born in Puebla, Mexico, in 1912 to Alberto B. Báez and Thalia Báez, his father was a Methodist minister, and his mother was a social worker for the YWCA.
Albert was four when his father moved his family to the United States, first to Texas for a year and then to New York City. Albert, his sister Mimi, and brother Peter were raised in Brooklyn, where his father founded the First Spanish Methodist Church in New York.
During his youth, Baez contemplated becoming a minister, but he followed his interests in mathematics and physics instead. Báez is the father of singers Joan Baez and Mimi Fariña.
In honor of National #HispanicHeritageMonth, we're spotlighting just a few of the many Hispanic American #STEM pioneers whose incredible achievements and innovations have benefited humankind: Franklin Chang-Díaz, Ellen Ochoa, Dr. Helen Rodríguez-Trias, & Albert Vinicio Báez. pic.twitter.com/uR59voMWq3
— Challenger Center (@ChallengerCtr) September 17, 2025
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