Janet Smith is the Martha L. Ludwig Distinguished University Professor of Biological Chemistry, Rita Willis Professor of the Life Sciences, professor of biophysics, and associate director of the Life Sciences Institute at the University of Michigan. She is an internationally recognized leader in structural biology who has made path-breaking contributions in the use of x-rays to determine crystal structures of proteins. Her research takes a structure-based approach to understand the function of biosynthetic enzymes, viral toxins and antiviral proteins. A native of Philadelphia, she is a first-generation university graduate with degrees in chemistry (B.S., Indiana University of Pennsylvania) and biochemistry (PhD, University of Wisconsin). She began her independent career at Purdue University and was recruited to the University of Michigan in 2005. She was a founder and is currently scientific director of the NIH-funded GM/CA facility for macromolecular crystallography at the Advanced Photon Source. The GM/CA team designed and implemented a world-leading micro-crystallography capability that opened the way for many advances in structural biology. Her group, currently with 6 PhD students, has published more than 200 papers. She is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (2008) and the American Crystallographic Association (2018), a member of the National Academy of Sciences (2020) and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2025), and a recipient of the Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin Award from the Protein Society (2021) and the Mildred Cohn Award in Biological Chemistry from the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (2022). She received an NIH MERIT Award (1998) for her productive and impactful research and service to the scientific community.
