David R. Smith received his Ph.D. from University of Wisconsin, Madison. He came to Stony Brook in 1966 and (with D. Tycko) established the computer science department in 1970. He was the chair of the department from 1986-1987. While at Stony Brook he published in the areas of combinational switching functions, shift register sequences, experimental parallel computer & chip architectures, hardware description languages, and hardware synthesis.