Research

A. J. Stewart Smith, the Class of 1909 Professor of Physics, was named dean for research in 2006. Smith first came to Princeton as a graduate student, having completed his undergraduate work in his native Canada at the University of British Columbia. After earning his Ph.D. in physics from Princeton in 1966, he joined the University faculty in 1967. He served as chair of the physics department from 1990 to 1998.

Smith is a leading researcher in high-energy particle physics and science policy, having carried out a succession of major experiments in particle physics at U.S. national laboratories. Since 1995, he has focused his research efforts on the BaBar experiment at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC), an international collaboration of 600 scientists from 10 countries. As a visiting professor at Stanford University from 2000 through 2002, he served as BaBar’s scientific team leader and spokesperson. During this period, the experiment observed matter-antimatter asymmetries that confirmed the theory of Makoto Kobayashi and Toshihide Maskawa, who were subsequently awarded the 2008 Nobel Prize in Physics for their work. Smith is the recipient of the American Physical Society's 2011 W. K. H. Panofsky Prize in Experimental Particle Physics.

A fellow of the American Physical Society, Smith has been a member of the experiments committee for the Large Hadron Collider at CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research) in Geneva, Switzerland, and he has served on boards for many other organizations, including Brookhaven National Laboratory, the U.S. Department of Energy, the National Academy of Sciences, and the National Research Council of Canada. 

Smith will serve as dean for research through June 2013, at which point he will become Vice President for the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory.