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Physics Professor Retires After 17 Years at the University

Gerald Smith, professor emeritus of physics and former head of the Department of Physics, has retired from the Eberly College of Science after 17 years at Penn State.

A highly respected administrator, researcher, and teacher, Smith has received numerous honors and has held membership in many professional societies.  He has served as author or coauthor of 290 articles published in scientific journals and has presented 181 invited papers, lectures, and seminars.  He has supervised theses for 25 graduate students and 15 undergraduates.

As an administrator, Smith helped the Department of Physics acquire major computational facilities, establish an electronics shop, and upgrade its machine shop during his tenure from 1983 to 1988.  He also increased collaboration between researchers at the University Park campus and other University locations, introduced microprocessors and workstations into the undergraduate curriculum, and secured additional funding for the department.  That funding supports junior faculty research programs and scholarship programs that help to improve the quality of graduate students entering the department.

His research, which has focused on atomic and nuclear antimatter physics and high-energy physics, has been supported by numerous funding awards from public and private sources.  The primary goal of Smith's most recent research is the creation, storage, and study of antimatter and it's application to propulsion, medicine, defense and other areas.

Prior to joining Penn State in 1983, Smith was a professor at Michigan State University from 1967 to 1982 and an instructor and assistant professor at the University of California at Berkeley from 1961 to 1967.  He also served in various part-time and full-time visiting appointments, including: associate laboratory director for High Energy Physics at Argonne National Laboratory in 1978; scientific associate for CERN in Switzerland, from 1983 to 1986; physicist for the Department of Energy, from 1990 to 1991; physicist for the U.S. Air Force, from 1991 to 1996; and faculty fellow and physicist for NASA, 1998 to present.

He earned his doctoral degree in physics at Yale University in 1961, his master's at Yale University in 1958, and his bachelor's, magna cum laude, at Miami University of Ohio in 1957.
 
 

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Last update:  20 June 2000