Research Interests: Urban poverty and joblessness, social capital and social networks, and the front end of criminal case processing. 

Smith's publications include Lone Pursuit: Distrust and Defensive Individualism among the Black Poor; The Criminal Justice System as a Labor Market Institution, co-edited with Jonathan Simon; and the forthcoming The Cultural Logics of Job-Matching Assistance. Her research on these topics has also been published in academic journals, including the American Journal of Sociology, The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences, the Annual Review of Sociology, The DuBois Review, Ethnic and Racial Studies, Social Problems, Social Science Research, The Sociological Quarterly, and Work and Occupations.

Smith serves or has recently served on a number of advisory boards, including WorkRise, Leadership Board for Research-to-Action Collaborative on Workers, Jobs, and Economic Mobility; Family Self-Sufficiency Research Technical Working Group of the Office of Planning, Research, and Evaluation; Laura and John Arnold Foundation, Pretrial Research Advisory Board; Y Combinator Research’s Basic Income Project Advisory Board; National Advisory Board, Misdemeanor Justice Project; University of California Criminal Justice & Health Consortium; and the Executive Session on Community Corrections, Harvard Kennedy School.

Smith’s service also extends to the discipline of sociology. She has been a Council member of the American Sociological Association, Chair of the ASA Section, Inequality, Poverty, and Mobility, and Deputy Editor of the American Sociological Review, where she also served as editorial board member. She was also on the editorial or consulting boards of the American Journal of Sociology, Contexts Magazine, and Sociological Science.

Smith, who holds an MA and Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Chicago and a B.A. in history-sociology from Columbia University, has been a visiting scholar at Stanford's Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences and at the Russell Sage Foundation.