Dr. Smyth graduated from Cornell University, College of Arts and Sciences, with a B.A. in Neurobiology and Behavior in 1992, and obtained his M.D. at the University of California, San Francisco, in 1996. During these years, Dr. Smyth first participated in basic neuroscience research in Dr. Carl Cotman’s laboratory at UC-Irvine investigating animal models of and human markers for Alzheimer’s Disease. After completing a general surgery internship at UC-Irvine in 1997, Dr. Smyth returned to UCSF to complete his residency training in Neurological Surgery in 2002. During his residency, Dr. Smyth was an NIH NRSA research fellow evaluating anticonvulsant resistance in an animal model of cortical dysplasia under the sponsorship of Dr. Scott Baraban at the UCSF Epilepsy Research Laboratory. Dr. Smyth then completed advanced fellowship training in pediatric neurosurgery at the University of Alabama at Birmingham before joining the faculty at Washington University in St. Louis as an Assistant Professor of Neurosurgery and Pediatrics on the Investigator Track.

At Washington University and St. Louis Children’s Hospital, Dr. Smyth has been active clinically since 2003 in pediatric epilepsy as the Director of the Pediatric Epilepsy Surgery Program and has developed a basic science laboratory for studying focal brain cooling in rodent models of epilepsy. Dr. Smyth was board certified in Neurological Surgery by the American Board of Neurological Surgeons in 2005 and by the American Board of Pediatric Neurological Surgery in 2006. He was inducted as a Fellow of the American College of Surgeons in 2007 and became an Associate Professor of Neurosurgery at Washington University in 2009.