Professor in Statistics
Director - Centre for the Analysis of Time Series
Education: PhD, Columbia University, 1987
Twitter: @lynrydsmyth
Email: l.smith@lse.ac.uk
Phone: +44 (0) 20 7955 7626
Location: TW3 4.01C, Clements Inn, London, WC2A 2AZ
Publications
Curriculum Vitae (pdf)
Research
Graduate Students
Professor Smith received his undergraduate degree in 'Physics, Mathematics and Computer Science' from the University of Florida, and a PhD in Physics at Columbia University (USA) in 1987. He has held visiting or fixed term research positions at Cambridge (UK), École Normale Supérieure (France), Warwick (UK) and Potsdam University (Germany). Since 1992 he has been a Senior Research Fellow (mathematics) at Pembroke College and Research Associate, Mathematics Institute, University of Oxford, (UK), and also became a Professor of Statistics at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) in October 2004. He has held grants funded by many bodies including ONR (US Office of Naval Research) and NOAA (US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) as well as from Australia, the European Commission and the UK Research Councils.
Two successful projects - DIME (Direct and Inverse Modelling in End-to-End Environmental Estimation) and REMIND (Real-time Modelling of Nonlinear Data-streams) - were funded under the UK EPSRC Maths Faraday program, and NAPSTER (Nonlinear Analysis and Prediction Statistics from Time Series and Ensemble forecast Realizations) was a project funded by a UK NERC Knowledge Transfer grant.
Professor Smith was active in the formation of strategy for THORPEX (he was co-author of the Socio-Economic Impacts Chapter) and the original experimental design(s) of climateprediction.net.
He has supervised doctoral students in the departments of physics and engineering, as well as mathematics and statistics. His interest in the public understanding of science led to a Selby Fellowship from the Australian Academy of Sciences, and to his book A Very Short Introduction to Chaos, published by OUP. In recognition of his contributions to mathematically-coherent user-relevant developments in meteorology, the Royal Meteorological Society awarded Professor Smith its Fitzroy Prize in 2003.
Professor Smith is currently a member of the ASA Advisory Committee on Climate Change Policy (ACCCP) and a member of the Smith Institute's Scientific Committee.