David W. Smith

Dr. David W. Smith is a Professor of Biology at the University of Delaware.  He received a Bachelor’s degree in Biology from the University of California, San Diego, a Master’s degree in Microbiology from Indiana University and a Ph.D. in Bacteriology from the University of Wisconsin.  After a two year term as a postdoctoral fellow in the Bacteriology department at UCLA, he joined the Biology faculty at the University of Delaware in 1975. 

Dr. Smith’s research interests were in the areas of bacterial physiology and microbial ecology, with special emphasis on the chemical transformations of inorganic materials in Delaware salt marshes.  He taught several courses in Microbiology, Genetics and Evolution and was the Undergraduate Program Director for Biological Sciences, the largest major at UD, for 12 years.

Dr. Smith has pursued a lifetime love of baseball with his scientific background to analyze the playing of the game in systematic ways.  He is the founder and President of Retrosheet, a non-profit organization dedicated to the collection, computerization and free distribution of the play by play accounts of Major League games.  This collection of nearly 150,000 games has formed the basis for his baseball research as well as that of many other baseball analysts