Temple F. Smith PhD

Dr. Temple Smith graduated with a Ph.D. in Nuclear Physics from the University of Colorado in 1969. Then did a National Institutes of Health (USA) postdoctoral fellowship under the direction of the mathematician, Stanislaw Ulam, and the molecular biologist, John R. Sadler. There he carried out a detailed analysis of the E. coli Lac operator mutations. In 1979, Dr. Smith was one of the founders of GenBank, the US/NIH repository of Nucleic acid and protein sequences, initially at Los Alamos National Laboratory. There, he with Walter Goad developed a statistical mechanical model of the Lac operon system similar to those now being developed in systems biology. Dr. Smith is a co-developer with Michael Waterman of the Smith-Waterman sequence alignment algorithm, underlying most DNA and protein sequence comparison methods today. Dr. Smith spent a sabbatical year working with Harold Morowitz at Yale resulting in a seminal paper on the relationship between biology, physics and history. In 1988 he moved to the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston, there organizing a computational biology research center and initiating a series of international meetings, “Genes and Machines” on the application of computers in modern biology. In 1991 the center moved to Boston University, becoming the BioMolecular Engineering Research Center in the College of Engineering. Dr. Smith research has included, the evolution of protein structure;the modeling of the WD-repeat protein family with Dr. Eva Neer; the history of the Life Guard apoptotic regulatory protein family. Dr. Smith has served on a number of NIH and NSF review and advisory panels. As a member of Fly Base, he helped carry out a full-genome comparative evolutionary analysis of the Drosophila clade. More recently he has investigated the origin of the eukaryotic cell and the evolutionary of the cellular genetic translation system. In 2015 Dr. Smith was inducted as a follow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), as is also a fellow of the ISCB. He has over 200 reviewed publications. Dr. Smith was elected Emeritus Professor in BioMedical Engineering at Boston University, where he has continued his research and graduate student advising. Dr. Smith is an avid skier, ice climber, sailor, hockey coach and family man with four sons. He is also the co-founder of a small gene engineering company, Modular Genetics, Inc. in Woburn, MA.