Dr. Curtis Lee Smith is a Professor of the Practice in Nuclear Science and Engineering at MIT, holding the KEPCO endowed chair, and brings more than three decades of experience in probabilistic risk assessment to both the nuclear and aerospace industries. He holds a Ph.D. in nuclear engineering from MIT and bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Idaho State University, and prior to joining MIT served as Director of the Nuclear Safety and Regulatory Research Division at Idaho National Laboratory, where he led major risk-informed initiatives including the Risk-Informed Safety Margins Characterization Pathway under the DOE Light Water Reactor Sustainability Program. He is perhaps best known as the principal designer and longtime project manager of SAPHIRE, the premier probabilistic risk assessment software used by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission and NASA — a tool that has been used to analyze every operating commercial nuclear power plant in the United States as well as the Space Shuttle, the International Space Station, and NASA’s Constellation Program.
Beyond his software and research contributions, Dr. Smith has been one of the most prolific educators in the PRA field, personally training over 800 NRC, NASA, and DOE staff through a curriculum he largely developed himself, spanning topics from Bayesian inference to human reliability analysis. He is a Fellow of the American Nuclear Society, past President of the International Association for Probabilistic Safety Assessment and Management, and has published over 300 papers, books, and reports across his career. His work spans nuclear power plant safety, aerospace mission risk, advanced reactor licensing, and the integration of artificial intelligence and machine learning into safety analysis — making him one of the most broadly impactful figures in applied nuclear risk research today.