Melissa Smith joined the ECE faculty in the Fall 2006 semester. She received a Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Tennessee and a M.S. and B.S. in Electrical Engineering both from Florida State University. She is a senior member of IEEE and actively involved in mentoring programs for young scientists and engineers.

While obtaining her Ph.D. at the University of Tennessee, in addition to her research at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, she conducted research in the Microelectronic Systems Laboratory in the area of High-Performance Reconfigurable Computers. While obtaining her M.S. in Electrical Engineering at the Florida State University, she was a research assistant with Dr. Alan George in the High-performance Computing and Simulation Research Laboratory, which has now expanded to include a lab both at the FAMU/FSU College of Engineering and at the University of Florida.

From 1994 to 2006, Dr. Smith was integral in a variety of research activities at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) including high-energy and nuclear physics instrumentation (Spallation Neutron Source at ORNL, the PHENIX particle physics experiment at Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL), and the Nuclear Weapons Inspection System (NWIS) program), submicron CMOS circuit design (analog, digital, and mixed signal), fault tolerant sensor networks, software defined radio, and high-performance and reconfigurable computing for real-time systems and scientific computation. She continues to conduct research at ORNL with some of the top research scientists in the country. She has received several awards for her contributions including ORNL Significant Event Awards in 1996 and 1998 and an ORNL Technical Achievement Award in 1998. Her achievements were once again recognized when she was awarded a prestigious ORNL Research Sabbatical from 2001-2003 for the completion of her PhD dissertation. Other recognitions include being named to the ORNL Women in History (2001), ORNL Women in Science (2005), and the 2006 Oak Ridge YWCA Tribute to Women Award in Science and Technology.

Dr. Smith’s current research activities and interests include Reconfigurable and High-Performance Computing where applications include scientific workloads, embedded systems, data mining, image processing, target and anomaly detection, and command/communication/control (C3) integration. Other interests include Distributed Sensor Networks, System Modeling & Analysis, High Speed Data Acquisition Systems and Software Defined Radio. She is also active in OpenFPGA where they are working to develop standards for the use of FPGAs and Reconfigurable Computing.