Born in Ponca City and raised in Stillwater, Brad Bays is a geographer at Oklahoma State University. He was introduced to preservation in 1989. After receiving his Bachelor’s in geography (history minor), his very first job was to work as a surveyor on an OSU/SHPO project to locate old mineshafts and other coal mining-related historic resources in Pittsburg County. He earned an M.S. in 1991 at the University of Tennessee, and he went on to earn a Ph.D. in historical geography at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. In 1995 he joined the faculty at OSU, where he began conducting surveys for the SHPO, including the statewide surveys of historic barns in Oklahoma.