Stew Smith
Chair
A. J. Stewart Smith is Senior Scientist and Class of 1909 Professor of Physics, Emeritus, at Princeton University. A UBC graduate, he received his doctorate in physics from Princeton in 1966 and joined the faculty the following year after a postdoctoral stint at the then-new Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron (DESY) in Hamburg, Germany. He chaired the Princeton Physics Department from 1990 to 1998. More advancements followed: He unified and expanded Princeton’s research operations as the University’s first dean for research from 2006 to 2013, before embarking on the new position of University vice president for PPPL, which the University manages for the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE). As a visiting scientist at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) in the 1990s and early 2000s, he was in charge of a multinational team of 600 physicists and engineers when it found a stunning new example of an asymmetry in nature that helps to explain why the universe contains stars, planets and people rather than nothing at all. Stewart has chaired the EAC since 2007.