Memoir

Edward E. Smith

Columbia University

April 23, 1940 - August 17, 2012


Scientific Discipline: Psychological and Cognitive Sciences
Membership Type:
Member (elected 1996)

Edward E. Smith was a renowned scholar in cognitive psychology and cognitive neuroscience. A highly productive researcher, he was also a dedicated teacher both of undergraduate and graduate students, and he mentored some of the finest cognitive psychologists of his time. Moreover, Smith served as a bridge to almost all the other subdisciplines of psychology—social, clinical, personality, developmental, and education—and his conversance with psycholinguistics, artificial intelligence, and epistemology allowed him to have an impact far beyond psychology.

Born in Brooklyn, New York, Smith attended graduate school at the University of Michigan and was awarded his Ph.D. in psychology in 1966. After working two years as an NIMH Research Associate at a psychiatric hospital, he took his first academic job in 1968 as an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin. Smith moved in 1970 to Stanford University, where he began his studies of semantic memory, language processing, categories, and concepts—areas he would cultivate throughout his career. In 1979 Smith became a senior scientist at the Cambridge, Massachusetts, firm of Bolt, Beranek, and Newman (now BBN Technologies), where his projects included efforts to train people in thinking skills.

Smith returned to academia, and to the University of Michigan, in 1986, where the emerging field of cognitive neuroscience attracted his attention; his work there included imaging evidence for multiple strategies and mechanisms of categorization, often gleaned from studies with patient populations. He also used neuroimaging to explore working memory, mental effects of aging, frontal-lobe damage, schizophrenia, and individual differences in attention and pain perception. In 2004 Smith joined the faculty of Columbia University. At his death in 2012 he was the William B. Ransford Professor of Psychology at Columbia as well as the director of the Division of Cognitive Neuroscience at the New York State Psychiatric Institute.

Smith received numerous honors throughout his career, but on a more personal note he “was extraordinarily helpful to everyone he interacted with,” according to longtime colleague Douglas L. Medin. “Ed’s incisive analysis was the key to research progress time after time. He also had a quick wit that could have been deployed in sharp critiques, but Ed used his it solely for teaching and entertainment.”

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