people:mlsmith:bio

Bio

Before joining Vassar in Fall 2006, I was an assistant professor at Colby College for five (5) years, beginning Fall 2001. Prior to my transition to academia, I worked for AT&T for fifteen (15) years, in several different internal IT capacities, including applications and systems development and support, and IT infrastructure systems engineering. One of the very special opportunities I had while working for AT&T was to be sponsored in its Doctoral Support Program, which enabled me to go back to school full-time to earn my Ph.D.
The AT&T I worked for no longer exists. Here’s a brief history of what happened (for more details, look it up in Wikipedia!):
- I joined American Telephone and Telegraph Company (AT&T) just two years after the Jan. 1, 1984 divestiture that broke up the Bell System monopoly (aka, Ma Bell).
- The company officially changed its name to AT&T Corp. during the time I worked for them.
- AT&T spun off Lucent Technologies (and the Bell Labs name). Lucent has since been acquired by Alcatel, forming the current Alcatel-Lucent.
- AT&T also spun off AT&T Wireless, who later merged with Cingular Wireless, a company owned by SBC Communications.
- AT&T Corp. has since “merged” with SBC Communications, forming the current AT&T Inc.

Ph.D., Computer Science (2000); University of Central Florida ( UCF ), Orlando, FL.
M.S., Computer Science (1993); UCF.
B.S., Computer Science (1986); UCF.