Marc L. Smith

Professor and Chair of Computer Science
Marc Smith wearing a navy blue shirt against a gray background.

Professor Smith earned his B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from the University of Central Florida. He worked in industry for AT&T for fifteen years, during which time his Ph.D. studies were sponsored by AT&T's Doctoral Support Program. While at AT&T he worked in several different IT capacities, including applications and systems development and support, and IT infrastructure systems engineering. He was an Assistant Professor at Colby College from 2001-2006, before coming to Vassar. His research spans elements of theoretical and experimental computer science, in the areas concurrency (models of parallel and distributed computation, programming languages, and unifying theories of programming) and bioinformatics (phylogenetic inference and evolutionary robotics). At Vassar he has taught CMPU-101 (Problem-Solving and Abstraction), CMPU-102 (Data Structures and Algorithms), CMPU-203 (Software Design and Implementation), CMPU-235 (Programming Languages), CMPU-245 (Declarative Programming Models), CMPU-240 (Language Theory and Computation), CMPU-353 (Bioinformatics), CMPU-375 (Networks), CMPU-377 (Parallel Programming), and CMPU-381 (Relational Databases and SQL) as an Intensive.

BS, MS, PhD, University of Central Florida
At Vassar since 2006

Contact

845-437-7497
Sanders Physics
Box 399

Research and Academic Interests

Models of Concurrency; Bioinformatics

Departments and Programs

Courses

CMPU 101 Computer Science I: Problem-Solving and Abstraction
CMPU 311 Database Systems

In the Media

A seated panel of four people listen while one of the panelists holds and speaks into a microphone.

Celebrating the 100th anniversary of tech pioneer Grace Hopper’s arrival on the Vassar campus, Vassar students, faculty, alums, and others in the tech field gathered at The Vassar Institute for the Liberal Arts on April 10, 2025, trading stories about the groundbreaking work she had done to shepherd the world into the modern computer age.

Photos

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