Albert, his sister Mimi and brother Peter were raised in Brooklyn where his father founded the First Spanish Methodist Church in New York.
The two had three daughters (Pauline, Joan, and Mimi), then moved to California: Báez enrolled at Stanford's doctoral program in physics.
[8] In 1948, Báez co-invented, with his doctoral program advisor, Paul Kirkpatrick, the X-ray reflection microscope for examination of living cells.
[2] In 1948, while still a graduate student at Stanford, he developed concentric circles of alternating opaque and transparent materials to use diffraction instead of refraction to focus X-rays.
[1] These zone plates proved useful and even essential decades later only with the development of sufficiently bright, high intensity, synchrotron X-ray sources.
[10] As the Cold War intensified in the 1950s, Báez's talent was in high demand in the burgeoning arms race, yet his family's pacifism moved him to refuse lucrative defense industry positions, and he devoted himself instead to education and humanitarianism.
He was the co-author of the textbook The Environment and Science and Technology Education (1987), and the memoir, A Year in Baghdad (1988), written with his wife Joan.
[13] After his retirement, Báez occasionally delivered physics lectures and was the president of Vivamos Mejor/USA in 1986,[5] an organization founded in 1988 to help impoverished villages in Mexico.