Baird was an active member of the Optical Society of America, of which he was a fellow and member/chairman of several technical groups and policy committees. He was a member of its board of directors, vce president and president in 1983. In 1989, he was awarded its C.E.K. Mees Medal "in recognition of his contributions to standards research and optical metrology and of his service to the International Commission for Optics and the Optical Society of America." Baird was also a member of the Canadian Association of Physicists and chairman of its Optical Physics Division; president of the International Commission of Optics (IUPAP – a Division of UNESCO); a member of the International Astronomical Union (IAU) and chairman of its working group on wavelength standards; a member of the International Advisory Committee for the Definition of the Meter and steering committee chairman for the redefinition of the meter in 1982, as well as serving on advisory boards for several optical journals. After retirement from the NRC in 1982, he was a visiting fellow at the Joint Institute of Laboratory Astrophysics (University of Colorado) and in 1983 a visiting scientist at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization in Sydney, Australia. While studying at the University of Bristol, England, Baird met his Swiss wife of 60 years, Erna Jaggi Baird, who died June 6, 2011, of a rare autoimmune disease, granulomatosis with polyangiitis. In 2012, the Erna Baird Memorial Grant was established in her memory and has since enabled vital research funding resulting in the identification of four genes as pivotal contributors to the risk for GPA. The grant has also enabled a new immune profiling strategy – an approach which allows for a very comprehensive characterization of a person’s immune system at any point in time, and which potentially will be applicable to all autoimmune diseases including rheumatoid arthritis and lupus. Baird currently resides in Ottawa. In 2015, he was the eldest recipient to be named a Member of the Order of Canada. He is currently years old, and when recently asked what he thinks about at night, he replied: “Oh, just basic physics.”