Linda Smith

Dr. Linda Smith is in the science mission office, where she is a member of the science policies group and manager of the STScI discretionary research funds. From 2013 to 2021, she led the institute’s instruments division, where she was responsible for more than 160 scientific and technical staff who work to achieve the best possible science from the instruments onboard the Hubble Space Telescope and planned for the use of the instruments aboard the James Webb Space Telescope. She served as an astronomer for the European Space Agency (ESA) at the institute from 2009 to 2021. Over the years, she led several teams, including the Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) and the Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 (WFPC2) team, and the ACS Servicing Mission Observatory Verification (SMOV) team.

Before arriving at the institute, Dr. Smith was a full professor at University College London in England, where she ran a research team and taught, supervised, and mentored undergraduate and graduate students in astronomy and physics. After earning her doctorate, she received the HSW Massey Research Prize for Postgraduate Studies in University College London’s Department of Physics and Astronomy. She was awarded an eight-year Advanced Research Fellowship (now a Rutherford Fellowship) by the United Kingdom’s Science and Engineering Research Council, which she held at University College London before becoming a member of its faculty.

Dr. Smith has published more than 300 articles, which have appeared in the Astronomical Journal, the Astrophysical Journal, and the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. She has presented at the American Astronomical Society Meeting, the Astronomical Society of the Pacific Conference Series, and IAU (International Astronomical Union) Symposia. She continues to contribute to many Hubble programs, including the Legacy Extragalactic UV Survey (LEGUS), which is designed to investigate star formation in nearby galaxies to quantify how the clustering of star formation evolves in space and time.

Education:

PhD in Astronomy, University College London
BSc in Astronomy, University College London

Research Interests:

Massive stars, feedback with the interstellar medium, young massive star clusters in star-forming galaxies

ORCID ID: 0000-0002-0806-168X