Professor Michael B. Smith received an A.A. from Ferrum College in 1967 and a BS in chemistry from Virginia Polytechnic Institute in 1969. After working for 3 years at the Newport News Shipbuilding and Dry Dock Co. in New- port News VA as an analytical chemist, he entered graduate school at Purdue University. He received a PhD in Organic Chemistry in 1977. He spent 1 year as a faculty research associate at the Arizona State University with Professor G. Robert Pettit, working on the isolation of cytotoxic principles from plants and sponges. He spent a second year of postdoctoral work with Professor Sidney M. Hecht at the Massachusetts Insti- tute of Technology, working on the synthesis of bleomycin A2.

Smith began his academic career at the University of Connecticut in 1979, where he is currently professor of chemistry.'In addition to this research, he is the author of the fifth, sixth, and seventh editions of March’s Advanced Organic Chemistry. He is also the author of an undergraduate textbook in organic chemistry titled Organic Chemistry. An Acid-Base Approach, now in its second edition. He is the editor of the Compendium of Organic Synthetic Methods, Volumes 6–13. He is the author of Organic Chemistry: Two Semesters, in its second edition, which is an outline of undergraduate organic chemistry to be used as a study guide for the first organic course. He has authored a research monograph titled Synthesis of Non-alpha Amino Acids, in its second edition.