Dr. Smith received a B. S. degree in Computer and Systems Engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, an M. S. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Connecticut, a Ph. D. in Economics from the State University of New York at Albany, and a second Ph. D. from the University of Idaho in Electrical Engineering.

She has worked in industry for the Pennsylvania Power and Light Company and the Kearfott Division of Singer and for a government laboratory, the Naval Undersea Warfare Center. The work at PP&L was in computer modeling of nuclear reactors, at Singer in inertial navigation system hardware and software design, and at NUWC in passive submarine sonar system design.

Her research interests include hardware for bioinformatics and computational molecular biology applications and asynchronous interface design for globally- asynchronous locally-synchronous (GALS) systems.

Dr. Smith is a Senior Member of the IEEE and member of the IEEE Computer Society, Electron Devices Society, and Computational Intelligence Society. She is a registered Professional Engineer in the State of Idaho.