Professor Emeritus, Biomedical Engineering

Biomolecular Engineering Research Center

Ph.D., Nuclear Physics, University of Colorado
B.S., Physics, Purdue University

Curriculum Vitae

Phone: (617) 353-7123; Fax: (617) 353-7020
Email: tsmith@bu.edu
Website: bmerc-www.bu.edu
Office: SLB 313; Office hours: By appointment

Recently inducted into AIMBE “for extraordinary contributions in defining and advancing the field of bioinformatics, with emphasis on novel engineering methods to predict protein structure and function”.

Research Interests

The syntactic and semantic structure of the genetic information in biomolecular sequences, structures, and their evolution.

Current Research

Dr. Smith’s research has centered on the application of computer science and mathematical methods to comparative genetic sequence studies. These have ranged from the development of new functional pattern recognition tools to time-calibrated viral evolutionary studies. Recent efforts have focused on the prediction and modeling of protein structure using Markov models and on the evolution of the cellular information processing machinery. In addition, Dr. Smith has been involved in developing database structures suitable for large-scale genome sequencing and analysis, including new Internet Web page interfaces. As the director of the BioMolecular Engineering Research Center, Dr. Smith works closely with many Boston area experimental molecular biologists in supportive and exploratory data analysis.

Selected Recent Publications

Hartman, Hyman and Smith, Temple F. “The evolution of the cilium and the eukaryotic cell” Cell Motility and the Cytoskeleton.66: 215-219. (2009)

Hu, Lan, Smith, Temple F. and Goldberger, Gabriel. “LFG: a candidate apoptosis regulatory gene family” Apoptosis. 14: 1255-1265. (2009)

Smith, Temple F., Lee, Jung C., Gutell, Robin R. and Hartman, Hyman. “The Origin and Evolution of the Ribosome” Biology Direct 3: 16, 1-13 (2008)

Smith, Temple F. “Chapter 2: Diversity of WD-Repeat Proteins” The Coronin Family of Proteins, 20-30 (2008)

Bhutkar, Arjun, Russo, Susan M., Smith, Temple F. and Gelbart, William M. “Genome-Scale Analysis of Positionally Relocated Genes” Genome Research 17: 1880-1887 (2007)

Hartman, Hyman, Favaretto, Paola and Smith, Temple F. “The Archaeal Origins of the Eukaryotic Translational System” Archaea 2: 1-9 (2006)

Venkatesan, Kavitha, McManus, Heather R., Mello, Craig C., Smith, Temple F. and Hansen, Ulla. ”Functional Conservation Between Members of an Ancient Duplicated Transcription Factor Family, LSF/Grainyhead” Nucleic Acids Research 31 (15): 4304-4316 (2003)