ELK GROVE, CA, January 01, 2021 /24-7PressRelease/ -- Roulette William Smith, PhD, has been included in Marquis Who's Who in America. As in all Marquis Who's Who biographical volumes, individuals profiled are selected on the basis of current reference value. Factors such as position, noteworthy accomplishments, visibility, and prominence in a field are all taken into account during the selection process.
Growing up, Dr. Smith thought very highly of his parents, who both held advanced degrees and pursued careers in teaching. His father taught design and tailoring at a trade school, and his mother taught primary education. In light of his parents' influence, Smith believed that teaching was the highest profession one could pursue. Therefore, he decided to pursue several advanced degrees himself. He matriculated as an early-admission student out of the tenth grade in high school, and went on to receive a Bachelor of Science in mathematics and chemistry from Morehouse College. He also earned a Master of Science in mathematics, Master of Science in computer science and Doctor of Philosophy in mathematical models in the social sciences and education, all from Stanford University. He also has taken several postgraduate courses at New Mexico Highlands University (in Las Vegas, NM) and the University of California San Francisco.
Dr. Smith arrived at Stanford University in 1961 as its then youngest graduate student to pursue an advanced degree in mathematics. Shortly afterwards, Stanford University began developing its computer science programs. He was able to work with professors in the early stages of developing computer-based education. His doctoral dissertation involved the development and study of artificial intelligence aspects of the Logic Teacher computer program for teaching elementary sentential logic in secondary schools.
Dr. Smith began his university teaching career at the University of California Santa Barbara in 1970, where he served as Assistant Professors in the Departments of Psychology and School of Education, and Acting Assistant Director of the Bureau of Educational R&D [BERD] in the School of Education. In 1973, when teaching an undergraduate class on artificial intelligence applications in psychology and education, Professor Smith and several UCSB undergraduate students explored a notion of computer "browsing" using, as a model, butterflies moving (i.e., flittering) from flower-to-flower pollinating plants. One of those students, the late Philip Lewis Karlton, subsequently earned a PhD in computer science at Carnegie Mellon University and was a principal programmer in the development of the first Netscape computer browser. Phil's Netscape browser proved to be extremely important in Smith's research in the late-1990s and early-2000s when he discovered and reported associations among stress-activated Epstein-Barr virus [EBV] on autism spectrum disorders and autoimmune disorders.
Smith also worked at IBM in San José and Los Gatos, Far West Laboratories in San Francisco, and volunteered as a substitute teacher in the Cherry Chase Elementary School in Sunnyvale, CA and the Ravenswood City School District in East Palo Alto, CA. Today, he serves as director of the Institute for Postgraduate Interdisciplinary Studies since 1984, as well as president and chief executive officer of Humanized Technologies, Inc., since 1973. He also has worked as a research scientist at the U.S. Naval Missile Center at Point Mugu, CA, and he has been a post-doctoral visiting scholar at Carnegie-Mellon University and Stanford University. He also has held faculty and administrative affiliations with San José State University, California State University at Dominguez Hills, and the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology (nee Sofia University) in Palo Alto. He also works as a consultant in the field.
During the early-1970s, Professor Smith also was the founding executive editor of Instructional Science and founding associate editor of Health Policy and Education (nee Health Policy), both initially published by the Elsevier Publishing Company in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. After a sabbatical at Carnegie Mellon University in 1975 working with legendary computer science scholars Professors Allen Newell and Herbert Simon, Smith explored possible admission to medical school in order to understand and advance both artificial and human intelligence, as well as their medical applications in elementary and secondary schools.
In 1976, Smith matriculated in the School of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. It was during this period that he worked in the laboratory of Neurology Professor Stanley Prusiner studying transmissible dementia using scrapie in the brains of Syrian golden hamsters as a model for Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. Smith then theorized that because memories in brain and the immune system are parsimonious in many ways, that there then should be transmissible 'immune dementia' analogous to transmissible dementia in brain. He presented a report in 1979 at the Seventh Meeting of the International Society for Neurochemistry [Jerusalem, ISRAEL] that theorized that lentiviruses could cause "immune dementia." That report accurately anticipated what became known in the early-1980s as HIV/AIDS.
His subsequent research and reports in the 1980s revealed the importance of symbiotic and synergistic relationships among gamma herpesviruses (e.g., the Epstein-Barr virus [EBV]) and lentiviruses (e.g., HIV). His research on EBV then revealed its association with transcription and/or translation errors in host genes [GERRs] thereby later explaining autism spectrum disorders, numerous autoimmune disorders, some cancers, some congenital conditions, hemoglobinopathies and other instances of viral-induced evolution. During the 1990s and early-2000s, it also was determined that EBV could be activated by stress.
During the recent coronavirus pandemic, Professor Smith has been exploring research on the COVID-19 virus and its possible interactions with stress-activated viruses such as EBV. This research has implications for 'long haul' prognoses associated with COVID-19 infections, multi-system inflammatory syndrome in children [MIS-C], and mRNA vaccines (because, when exposed to active EBV infections, vaccine mRNA may give rise to GERRs). Also, because of extreme stresses associated with the pandemic and ancillary events (e.g., economic upheavals, structural and systemic racism, and aberrations in commonsense involving social behaviors), Smith's research began taking on other interdisciplinary social and developmental science concerns, including his earlier research on common sense, aberrant commonsense, psychoviruses, and the economics of aberrant commonsense. Regarding the latter, and after traveling across the globe in pursuit of this research on common sense, he has found that recent political and social developments are characterized by counterproductive divergences in common sense involving considerable economic costs and excess mortalities.
As a respected voice in his field, Professor Smith previously served as executive editor of Instructional Science and associate editor of Health Policy. He is also holds US Patents for 'moleculator' devices and processes for modeling molecular flow and interactions, with an ultimate goal of modeling chemical error processing and GERRs.
In his community, he was active with San Francisco Head Start, Concerned Black Parents in Palo Alto, Coordinator for 'Gatekeepers to the Future' Elderhostels, and many other local community efforts.
In addition to countless commendations from several industry organizations, Professor Smith also was a summer faculty fellow at NASA-Ames, and he received a research grant from the Bess Spiva Timmons Foundation. And, until his retirement from university teaching, he has maintained professional affiliations with the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Psychological Association, the American Educational Research Association, the American Public Health Association, the American Association of Computing Machinery, the New York Academy of Sciences, the AIDS and Anthropology Research Group and the Bay Area Black Coalition Against AIDS.
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