Dr. Smith is Senior Associate at the Center for Biosecurity of UPMC and Assistant Professor at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. He is a molecular biologist by training. Dr. Smith’s policy research focuses on improving the supply of medicines, vaccines, and other medical countermeasures for biosecurity threats through promotion of policies to increase private sector engagement in countermeasure R&D, improve the science and technology of drug and vaccine development processes, and facilitate an effective interface among the biomedical research, policymaking, and national security communities. Dr. Smith is one of the principal organizers of the Alliance for Biosecurity, a collaborative effort established in 2005 among the Center and more than 10 biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies to promote a new era in the prevention and treatment of infectious diseases—specifically, those that present global security challenges—through innovative scientific and policy initiatives. Dr. Smith is involved in strengthening international biosecurity preparedness, and in 2005 he served as the Project Director for the widely recognized Atlantic Storm exercise—a bioterrorism tabletop exercise in which international leaders from Europe and North America responded to a series of bioterrorist attacks. Dr. Smith is an associate editor of the peer-reviewed journal Biosecurity and Bioterrorism: Biodefense Strategy, Practice, and Science, and he has authored several articles about policies regarding bioterrorism countermeasure research and development as well as international disease response. Dr. Smith joined the Center for Biosecurity at its founding on November 1, 2003. Prior to this, he was a fellow at the Johns Hopkins University Center for Civilian Biodefense Strategies and an assistant scientist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Dr. Smith has extensive hands-on laboratory experience with bacteria and with the tools of molecular biology that are used in genetic engineering. He received a BA in Biology in 1994 from Williams College and a PhD in Biology in 2001 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he worked with Professors Graham Walker and Alan Grossman to study mechanisms of DNA repair, DNA mutagenesis, and DNA damage tolerance in the bacteria Escherichia coli and Bacillus subtilis. He is a member of the American Society for Microbiology and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. | 
