Richard Smith

About

Richard L. Smith is the Mark L. Reed III Distinguished Professor of Statistics and Professor of Biostatistics at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He currently serves as the Director of Graduate Studies for the Department of Statistics and Operations Research. From 2010 to 2017, he was the Director of the Statistical and Applied Mathematical Sciences Institute, a Mathematical Sciences Institute supported by the National Science Foundation. He earned his PhD from Cornell University and has held academic positions at Imperial College London, the University of Surrey, and Cambridge University. His primary research interests lie in environmental statistics and related methodological areas such as spatial statistics, time series analysis, and extreme value theory. He has a particular focus on statistical aspects of climate change research and air pollution, including its health effects. Smith is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association and the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, an Elected Member of the International Statistical Institute, and a Chartered Statistician of the Royal Statistical Society. He has been recognized with the Guy Medal in Silver from the Royal Statistical Society and the Distinguished Achievement Medal from the Section on Statistics and the Environment of the American Statistical Association. In 2004, he was the J. Stuart Hunter Lecturer of The International Environmetrics Society, and in 2020, he was elected a Fellow of the American…

Research topics

• Chemistry
• Organic chemistry
• Inorganic chemistry
• Biology
• Engineering
• Chemical engineering
• Combinatorial chemistry
• Materials science

Selected publications

• Radon Exposure and Incident Stroke Risk in the Women's Health Initiative.

  UNC Libraries · 2025-02-01 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access

  BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES: Little is known about the role of radon in the epidemiology of stroke among women. We therefore examined the association between home radon exposure and risk of stroke among middle-aged and older women in the United States. METHODS: We conducted a prospective cohort study of postmenopausal women aged 50-79 years at baseline (1993-1998) in the Women's Health Initiative. We measured exposures as 2-day, indoor, lowest living-level average radon concentrations in picocurie…

  PublisherDOI

• Investigating the association between late spring Gulf of Mexico sea surface temperatures and U.S. Gulf Coast precipitation extremes with focus on Hurricane Harvey

  UNC Libraries · 2025-07-19

  articleOpen access

  Hurricane Harvey brought extreme levels of rainfall to the Houston, Texas, area over a 7‐day period in August 2017, resulting in catastrophic flooding that caused loss of human life and damage to personal property and public infrastructure. In the wake of this event, there has been interest in understanding the degree to which this event was unusual and estimating the probability of experiencing a similar event in other locations. Additionally, researchers have aimed to better understand the way…

  PublisherDOI

Recent grants

• Collaborative Research: Advancing extreme value analysis of high impact climate and weather events

  NSF · $111k · 2013–2019

• Statistical and Applied Mathematical Sciences Institute

  NSF · $17.7M · 2012–2018

Frequent coauthors

• Haixin Guo

  Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences

  746 shared

• Zhen Fang

  Shandong University of Finance and Economics

  723 shared

• Feng Shen

  Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs

  719 shared

• Lujiang Xu

  Nanjing Agricultural University

  679 shared

• P.K. Sinha

  676 shared

• Alberto Veses

  Instituto de Carboquímica

  676 shared

• E. Aparicio

  Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila

  676 shared

• M.S. Callén

  676 shared

Labs

• Richard L. Smith Department of Statistics and Operations ResearchPI

Education

• Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering, Department of Chemical Engineering

  Georgia Institute of Technology

  1985

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