Dr. Smith currently serves as Senior Director of in Health and Biosciences at Parsons. In this role, she leverages best-in-class resources, capabilities and expertise from Parsons to work at the leading edge of diverse markets to develop and deliver solutions and services in the areas of medical countermeasure discovery and development, disease surveillance, monitoring and detection; health IT and analytics; autonomous health and medical support, public health and medical situational awareness and decision support; and research, development, testing and evaluation. She places high value on the mentorship of younger scientists, seeking frequent engagement and facilitating career growth and enrichment opportunities for her staff and personnel.

Prior to Parsons, Dr. Smith spent greater than 15 years managing Federal government medical programs – supporting military and force health and biodefense, facilitating interagency collaboration to harmonize military requirements with public health preparedness and emergency response, and managing medical countermeasure discovery and development. She worked in the Vaccines and Therapeutics Division, Chemical and Biological Technologies Directorate at the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) where she focused on investment in basic, applied, and advanced research to facilitate the discovery and development of therapeutics to treat infections caused by antimicrobial resistant and biothreat bacterial pathogens, managing an annual budget of roughly $40M to that end. During her tenure, Dr. Smith established multiple joint investment ventures with interagency and international partners realizing significant cost savings while accelerating the delivery of new therapeutics; conceived, established, and managed an innovative test and evaluation investment platform that facilitated agile and flexible investment; contributed to interagency coordination and development of medical countermeasures through participation in PHEMCE (Public Health Emergency Medical Countermeasures Enterprise) working groups, voting membership on Product Coordination Teams, and presentation of joint panels at speaking engagements/conferences; and represented the United States DOD on an international working group focused on the development of a harmonized strategy for antibacterial development and investment with UK, Canadian, and Australian defense and public health agencies. For her service, Dr. Smith received the Meritorious Civilian Service Award. Prior to her civilian service, Dr. Smith was a contractor Reachback Scientist in DTRA’s 24/7/365 Technical Reachback Center, serving as a subject matter expert in the field of microbiology and biochemistry, providing CBRNE analytic support to DTRA customers, and specializing in the development and testing of modeling and simulation tools.