Dr. Michael W. Smith, who joined the NHGRI in 2012, brought his genetics and genomics research and management expertise to the Extramural Program to lead the technology development program and coordinate small business genomics research.  His breadth of experiences combined with working with many inquiries, applicants and grantees can assist researchers broadly with technology development and small business genomic science.  His broad scientific and management expertise can provide useful cross NHGRI and NIH perspectives in guiding pursuit and execution of genomics research opportunities. Dr. Smith specifically handles research topics of technologies for nucleic acid sequencing and synthetic nucleic acids.

Dr. Smith earned Bachelor of Science degrees in zoology and statistics from the University of Georgia, and his Doctor of Philosophy from the Johns Hopkins University in the area of molecular population genetics. His post-doctoral work focused on molecular evolution at the University of California-San Diego. He subsequently was Assistant Director at the new (at the time) Chromosome 11 Human Genome Center at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies. Dr. Smith was then recruited to the intramural program of the National Cancer Institute (NCI) where he was a principal investigator for a decade and a half in the Laboratory of Genomic Diversity. His research focused on human genetic analysis and disease gene discovery including elucidating, developing and then applying admixture approaches, seminal discoveries in kidney disease genetics (Apo1) and HIV-1/AIDS host genetics (CCR5 and CCR2), and applying molecular genetics techniques to fundamental behavioral and exposure questions in epidemiology. Dr. Smith served as an Adjunct Faculty member of the Department of Epidemiology of the Bloomberg School of Public Health of the Johns Hopkins University during this time.  Towards the end of his twenty years at the NCI, Dr. Smith directed the Genetics and Genomics Group of the Advanced Technology Program where he built a next-generation sequencing facility from the ground up and led significant improvements of another genomics core facility. He is an author on over one-hundred peer reviewed publications (Michael W. Smith on Google Scholar).