Professor Baker teaches a Global AIDS Policy seminar, disability law, and negotiations. His scholarship originally focused on theories of practice-based learning, but more recently has turned to intellectual property and access to medicines and intensifying the legal, economic and policy response to the global AIDS pandemics. He has taught and consulted in South African law schools and law school clinics since 1997, particularly concerning legal skills, multiculturalism, human rights, and more recently HIV/AIDS and access to medicines. Professor Baker is an honorary research fellow at the University of KwaZulu Natal in Durban, South Africa.

Professor Baker is a policy analyst for Health GAP (Global Access Project) and is actively engaged in campaigns for universal access to treatment, prevention, and care for people living with HIV/AIDS, especially expanded and improved medical treatment. He has written and consulted extensively on intellectual property rights, trade, and access to medicines, including with the African Union, ASEAN, Venezuela, CARICOM, Thailand, UK DfID, the World Health Organization, the Millennium Development Goals Project, the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, Open Society Institute, UNDP, UNITAID, the Medicines Patent Pool, the Global Commission on HIV and the Law, and others. He also serves as an NGOs delegation alternate board member for UNITAID, which was established in 2006 by the governments of Brazil, Chile, France, Norway and the United Kingdom to improve market dynamics and early market entry for medicines and diagnostics needed to address HIV/AIDS, TB, and malaria. Today, it is backed by an expanding “North-South” membership, including Cyprus, Korea, Luxembourg, Spain and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation alongside Cameroon, Congo, Guinea, Madagascar, Mali, Mauritius and Niger. Civil society groups also help govern UNITAID, giving a voice to non-governmental organizations and communities living with HIV, malaria and tuberculosis.

He works on policy issues concerning the Global Fund and the US PEPFAR Program, and how those priority disease initiatives might contribute more broadly to improving health care delivery in developing countries. Similarly, he works on issues involving human resources for health and health system strengthening and is a member of the steering committee of the Health Workforce Advocacy Initiative of the Global Health Workforce Alliance. Finally, he analyzes resource needs for global health, innovative financing mechanisms, and IMF macroeconomic policies that restrict increased government and donor spending on health and education in developing countries.