Hobart Muir Smith - Career

Career

In 1936 Smith was awarded a National Research Council Fellowship at the University of Michigan, where he worked with several other researchers to write and publish The Mexican and Central American Lizards of the Genus Sceloporus. In 1937 he worked for both the Chicago Academy of Sciences and the Field Museum of Natural History. He was given a fellowship by the Smithsonian Institution to collect specimens in Mexico, and collected over 20,000. From 1941 until 1945 he was a zoology professor at the University of Rochester, in New York. In 1945 he returned to the University of Kansas as an associate professor and wrote the Handbook of Lizards, Lizards of the US and of Canada. In 1946 he moved to Texas and became an associate professor of wildlife management at Texas A&M University and wrote Checklist and key to snakes of Mexico and Checklist and key to amphibians of Mexico with Taylor. From 1947 until 1968 he was a professor of zoology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He retired in 1968 and moved to Boulder, Colorado, where he became a professor of biology at the University of Colorado. In 1972 he became chairman of, what is now, the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. In 1983 he retired, becoming a professor emeritus and continued his personal research with over 1,600 publications, including 29 books.