Bruce Smith

Bruce L. Smith is a plasma physicist who earned his doctorate at Princeton University for research on particle simulation of auroral double layers — the electric field structures in Earth’s upper atmosphere associated with the northern lights. Smith earned his undergraduate degree at the United States Military Academy at West Point before receiving his Hertz Fellowship in 1981 and completing his doctorate in plasma physics at Princeton. His dissertation used computational particle-in-cell simulations to model the complex plasma physics of double layers in the auroral magnetosphere.