Biography

Dr. Smith earned his B.S. (1985) and Ph.D. (1989) degrees from the University of California, Santa Cruz. In his doctoral work Dr. Smith investigated the function of alternatively spliced forms of the pituitary growth hormone receptor. After receiving his Ph.D., Dr. Smith worked as a Fogerty fellow at the Laboratoire de Genetique Moleculare des Eucaryotes in Strasbourg, France, where he studied the retinoic acid receptor in the laboratory of Dr. Pierre Chambon. In subsequent work in the laboratory of Dr. Richard Harland as an American Cancer Society Postdoctoral Fellow he worked on the developmental biology of the amphibian Xenopus laevis. While in the Harland laboratory Dr. Smith developed methods for expression cloning in Xenopus that lead to the discovery of the axis inducing factors noggin and Xnr3. Dr. Smith joined the faculty at UCSB in 1995, and was soon afterward named a recipient of the Beckman Young Investigator Award.

Research Area

My laboratory focuses on Ciona as a model for neural circuit analysis. Tunicates, such as Ciona, are invertebrate marine chordates and the closest living relatives of the vertebrates. Tunicates are much simpler than vertebrates, which can be seen at all levels: gene and cellular complexity, and most importantly for our studies, nervous system complexity. We research the free-swimming Ciona larval tadpole, which has only ~180 neurons. Ciona is one of only a handful of animals for which we have a synaptic connectome - and the only Chordate. The connectome details all of the synaptic connections between the neurons of the nervous system. Ciona larvae have a number of highly reproducible and easily quantified behaviors including negative phototaxis (swimming away from light), gravitaxis (swimming upward) and several escape behaviors that presumably protect them from predation, including erratic swimming in response to shadows or touch. Recent projects have taken advantage of the great potential for investigating the links between neural circuits and behavior using the connectome and behavior assays.