Dr. Smith received his Ph.D. in Engineering Science from the University of California at Berkeley where he held an NSF  Fellowship. He holds a bachelor’s degree in Physics from Harvey Mudd College and an MBA from Berkeley. He is currently the Altarum/ERIM Russell D. O'Neal Professor of Engineering at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

He has been a visiting professor at the Statistical Laboratory, University of Cambridge; the Faculty of Systems Theory and Operations Research, Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands; the Department of Industrial Engineering and Operations Research, Columbia University; the Econometric Institute, Erasmus University, Rotterdam, The Netherlands; Laboratoire d'Automatique et d'Analyse du Systems du CNRS, Toulouse, France; the Faculty of Industrial Engineering and Management, Technion, Haifa, Israel; the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute, Berkeley, California; the Operations Research Group, Institute of Pure and Applied Mathematics, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; the Department of Industrial Engineering and Operations Research, University of California, Berkeley.

He is the recipient of the first Altarum/ERIM Russell D. O'Neal Professorship of Engineering at the University of Michigan. He has also been honored with the Distinguished Faculty Achievement Award from the University of Michigan, the College of Engineering Research Excellence Award, the Industrial and Operations Engineering Award for Outstanding Accomplishment, an Outstanding Teacher Award from the Michigan Student Assembly, and a National Science Foundation Fellowship. He is a Fellow of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences and serves on the Advisory Board of Clearsight Systems, Inc.

Professor Smith teaches courses in dynamic programming and stochastic processes. He has supervised the doctoral research of over twenty-five students since 1984.

He is Director of the Dynamic Systems Optimization Laboratory at the University of Michigan. The Laboratory research is directed toward the modeling and analysis of dynamical systems over time. He is also the UM Thrust Leader for Manufacturing Systems for the General Motors Collaborative Research Laboratory in Advanced Vehicle Manufacturing at the University of Michigan. Dr. Smith worked earlier at Bell Laboratories in the Network Planning Department where he developed models and algorithms for optimal routing of communications traffic. He was recently PI or co-PI on four NSF Grants in global and infinite horizon optimization within the Operations Research, Manufacturing Enterprise Systems Programs, and CISE division of the National Science Foundation.  Dr. Smith is an Associate Editor of Operations Research and past Associate Editor of Management Science, and is the author of nearly a hundred peer reviewed publications.

Dr. Smith is on leave this year from the University of Michigan serving as Program Director for Operations Research at the National Science Foundation in Arlington, Virginia.