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Biography
Stewart Smith is a particle physicist whose major research interest for many years has been the the BaBar experiment at SLAC. As Scientific Spokesperson (2000-02) and Technical Coordinator (1999-2000) he had central roles in the 2001 discovery of CP-violating asymmetries in B meson processes, which culminated 37 years of searches for CP violation outside the neutral kaon system. This, and later results from BaBar and from the Belle experiment in Japan confirmed conclusively the Cabibbo-Kobayashi-Maskawa picture of CP violation within the Standard Model, leading to Nobel Prizes for Kobayashi and Maskawa. In addition, Smith led the design and construction of the BaBar central tracking drift chamber (1996-98), and following his term as spokesperson he proposed and led a massive project to upgrade the BaBar muon system (2002-2006).
Before joining BaBar, Smith had carried out experiments at the Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron (DESY) on tests of quantum electrodynamics; at Fermilab on lepton-pair production and hadron structure functions (experiments 331, 444, and 615); and on rare kaon decays at the Brookhaven AGS (E787 and E949), for which he was awarded the 2011 W.K.H. Panofsky Prize by the American Physical Society. His group’s 1971 limit on the CP violating asymmetry in the decays K± → π π± stood for more than 45 years, and the E787/949 measurement of K+ →π υϋ lasted 22 years before CERN NA 62 achieved comparable sensitivity.
Smith received BA and MSc degrees from the University of British Columbia (1959/61), a PhD from Princeton University (1966), and an honorary DSc. degree from the University of Victoria in 2009. After a Stiftung Volkswagenwerk fellowship at DESY, he returned to Princeton in 1967, chairing the Physics department 1990 – 1998, and spending 2000 – 2002 as Visiting Professor at Stanford. He became Princeton’s founding Dean for Research (after 280 years …), serving from 2006 through 2013 when he became University Vice President for the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (another new position), serving from 2013-2016. Smith retired from the university in 2017, maintaining appointments as Senior Scientist and Class of 1909 Professor, Emeritus.
A fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Smith chaired the Division of Particles and Fields in 1991. He has served on numerous advisory committees for the US DOE and NSF, the INFN in Italy, and for National Laboratories in the US, Canada, Italy; and at CERN in Switzerland.
Smith had recently become Dean for Research when the BaBar experiment was shut down in 2008. Rather than continue analyzing archival BaBar data, he decided to focus instead on helping CERN and SNOLAB bring their challenging new experimental programs to fruition.
• From 2004 through 2009 he served on the CERN Large Hadron Collider Committee (LHCC) as ‘chief referee’ for the CMS experiment, to advise the CMS team (based on his BaBar experience) and to report to the CERN director on progress and problems.
• He returned to CERN in 2013 to chair the new LHCC Upgrade Cost Group, whose mandate was to establish and carry out the project approval process (analogous to the “critical decision” system in the US) for the ~ 800M CHF upgrade program for the 4 major LHC experiments (CMS, ATLAS, LHCb and ALICE). The 45 national funding agencies require UCG approval before making any commitments. This work was finally completed in 2024.
• From 2007 till 2023 Smith chaired the Experimental Advisory Committee at SNOLAB (Sudbury, Ontario), advising the director and, unusual for such a committee, providing technical oversight as the Sudbury site evolved from a single experiment into a major laboratory.
• From 2015 through 2022 Smith served as President of the International Evaluation Committee (CVI) of the Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare (INFN), the funding agence for all Italian nuclear and particle physics. The mandate of the CVI is: “to comprehensively assess the scientific and technological results achieved by the INFN, and its future development plans.” (The CVI consists of five scientists, both Italian and foreign, and two experts representing the economic and manufacturing community appointed by the Governing Council.)
• From 2021 till the present Smith serves on the INFN’s DarkSide Review Panel, charged to report on progress and problems of the DarkSide experiment to search for dark matter at the underground Laboratorio Nazionale di Gran Sasso.