Smith graduated
summa cum laude with a bachelor's degree in classical civilization from the
University of California, Santa Barbara in 1985. She earned a master's degree in archaeology from the University of California, Los Angeles in 1988 and completed her Ph.D. in anthropology at the
University of Michigan in 1997. After postdoctoral work at the
University of Arizona,
Southern Methodist University, and the
Smithsonian Institution, she became an assistant professor at the
University of Pittsburgh in 2000. She returned to the University of California, Los Angeles as a faculty member in 2002. In 2016, Smith along with geographer
Thomas Gillespie researched potential sites for
Edicts of Ashoka. The edicts are evidence of early political regimes,
urbanism, and the spread of
Buddhism within the
Indian subcontinent. The team used a computer model to extrapolate 121 possible sites, mostly in the
Deccan Plateau,
Afghanistan-Pakistan border,
North West India, based on similarities, such as geological and population data, to existing sites. The paper was published in the
Current Science scientific journal. Smith is a member of the Editorial Advisory Board of the archaeology journal
Antiquity. ==Books==