About

Richard L. Smith is the Mark L. Reed III Distinguished Professor of Statistics and Professor of Biostatistics at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He currently serves as the Director of Graduate Studies for the Department of Statistics and Operations Research. From 2010 to 2017, he was the Director of the Statistical and Applied Mathematical Sciences Institute, a Mathematical Sciences Institute supported by the National Science Foundation. He earned his PhD from Cornell University and has held academic positions at Imperial College London, the University of Surrey, and Cambridge University. His primary research interests lie in environmental statistics and related methodological areas such as spatial statistics, time series analysis, and extreme value theory. He has a particular focus on statistical aspects of climate change research and air pollution, including its health effects. Smith is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association and the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, an Elected Member of the International Statistical Institute, and a Chartered Statistician of the Royal Statistical Society. He has been recognized with the Guy Medal in Silver from the Royal Statistical Society and the Distinguished Achievement Medal from the Section on Statistics and the Environment of the American Statistical Association. In 2004, he was the J. Stuart Hunter Lecturer of The International Environmetrics Society, and in 2020, he was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).

Research topics

• Chemistry
• Organic chemistry
• Inorganic chemistry
• Biology
• Engineering
• Chemical engineering
• Combinatorial chemistry
• Materials science

Selected publications

• Prediction of pharmaceutical solubility in mixed-solvents with a local composition-quantum energy parameter model

  Fluid Phase Equilibria · 2025-06-13 · 1 citations

  articleSenior authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Entropy-Based Solubility Parameter-Translated Peng–Robinson Equation of State (eSPT-PR EoS)

  Liquids · 2025-08-25

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Peng–Robinson equation of state (PR EoS) has good prediction accuracy for phase diagrams of pure substances or mixtures, but liquid density, especially for high polar substances, is known to be ~20% lower value compared with experimental data at standard atmospheric temperature and pressure (SATP) conditions. To overcome this issue, translation via entropy-based solubility parameter (eSP) Peng–Robinson EoS (eSPT-PR EoS) is proposed in this work. The technique uses eSP for the liquid phase at SATP conditions and correlates the ideal value and a constant C for each substance as a correction. As a result, the C value can be linearly correlated with critical compressibility factor (ZC). Finally, the liquid density was improved and gave an average relative deviation (ARD) value of 4.2% for the generally used 27 chemicals selected at SATP condition. Furthermore, critical density was also improved and gave ARD values of 3.9% compared with the original PR EoS of 21.8%. Thus, a universal calculation method based on PR EoS was developed for improving liquid density representation with the eSPT-PR EoS.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Coupled nitrate-to-ammonia reduction and persulfate production for ciprofloxacin removal via Cu2O/Cu nanorod and BDD electrodes

  Journal of Hazardous Materials · 2025-07-22 · 2 citations

  article
  PublisherDOI

• Self-reducing Cu2O/Cu nanosheet interface for efficient electrocatalytic production of ammonium from nitrate

  Applied Catalysis B: Environmental · 2025-03-15 · 31 citations

  article
  PublisherDOI

• IPO Market Timing in Venture Capital

  2025-01-01

  book-chapterSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Radon Exposure and Incident Stroke Risk in the Women's Health Initiative.

  UNC Libraries · 2025-02-01 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access

  BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES: Little is known about the role of radon in the epidemiology of stroke among women. We therefore examined the association between home radon exposure and risk of stroke among middle-aged and older women in the United States. METHODS: We conducted a prospective cohort study of postmenopausal women aged 50-79 years at baseline (1993-1998) in the Women's Health Initiative. We measured exposures as 2-day, indoor, lowest living-level average radon concentrations in picocuries per liter (pCi/L) as estimated in 1993 by the US Geological Survey and reviewed by the Association of American State Geologists under the Indoor Radon Abatement Act. We used Cox proportional hazards models to estimate risk of incident, neurologist-adjudicated stroke during follow-up through 2020 as a hazard ratio and 95% CI, adjusting for study design and participant demographic, social, behavioral, and clinical characteristics. RESULTS: Among 158,910 women without stroke at baseline (mean age 63.2 years; 83% white), 6,979 incident strokes were identified over follow-up (mean 13.4 years). Incidence rates were 333, 343, and 349 strokes per 100,000 woman-years at radon concentrations of <2, 2-4, and >4 pCi/L, respectively. Compared with women living at concentrations <2 pCi/L, those at 2-4 and >4 pCi/L had higher covariate-adjusted risks of incident stroke: hazard ratio (95% CI) 1.06 (0.99-1.13) and 1.14 (1.05-1.22). Using nonlinear spline functions to model radon, stroke risk was significantly elevated at concentrations ranging from 2 to 4 pCi/L (p = 0.0004), that is, below the United States Environmental Protection Agency Radon Action Level for mitigation (4 pCi/L). Associations were slightly stronger for ischemic (especially cardioembolic, small vessel occlusive, and large artery atherosclerotic) than hemorrhagic stroke, but otherwise robust in sensitivity analyses. DISCUSSION: Radon exposure is associated with moderately increased stroke risk among middle-aged and older women in the United States, suggesting that promulgation of a lower Radon Action Level may help reduce the domestic impact of cerebrovascular disease on public health.

  PublisherDOI

• High-pressure phase equilibria of liquid CO2 with ethanol - water mixtures

  Fluid Phase Equilibria · 2025-04-24 · 1 citations

  article
  PublisherDOI

• NiFeCo wrinkled nanosheet electrode for selective oxidation of 5-hydroxymethylfurfural to 2,5-furandicarboxylic acid

  Green Chemistry · 2025-01-01 · 25 citations

  articleOpen access

  FeCo-modified β-Ni(OH) 2 wrinkled nanosheets were prepared by a hydrothermal method for efficient electrocatalytic oxidation of HMF to FDCA.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Investigating the association between late spring Gulf of Mexico sea surface temperatures and U.S. Gulf Coast precipitation extremes with focus on Hurricane Harvey

  UNC Libraries · 2025-07-19

  articleOpen access

  Hurricane Harvey brought extreme levels of rainfall to the Houston, Texas, area over a 7‐day period in August 2017, resulting in catastrophic flooding that caused loss of human life and damage to personal property and public infrastructure. In the wake of this event, there has been interest in understanding the degree to which this event was unusual and estimating the probability of experiencing a similar event in other locations. Additionally, researchers have aimed to better understand the ways in which the sea surface temperature (SST) in the Gulf of Mexico (GoM) is associated with precipitation extremes in this region. This work addresses all of these issues through the development of a multivariate spatial extreme value model. Our analysis indicates that warmer GoM SSTs are associated with higher precipitation extremes in the western Gulf Coast region during hurricane season and that the precipitation totals observed during Hurricane Harvey are less unusual based on the warm GoM SST in 2017. As SSTs in the GoM are expected to steadily increase over the remainder of this century, this analysis suggests that western Gulf Coast locations may experience more severe precipitation extremes during hurricane season.

  PublisherDOI

• Electrocatalytic oxidation of biomass-derived furans to 2,5-furandicarboxylic acid – a review

  Green Chemistry · 2025-01-01 · 16 citations

  review

  Analysis of key factors that affect electrocatalytic oxidation and separation and purification processes for the conversion of biomass-derived furans into 2,5-furandicarboxylic acid (FDCA).

  PublisherDOI

Recent grants

• Collaborative Research: Advancing extreme value analysis of high impact climate and weather events

  NSF · $111k · 2013–2019

• Statistical and Applied Mathematical Sciences Institute

  NSF · $17.7M · 2012–2018

Frequent coauthors

• Haixin Guo

  Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences

  746 shared

• Zhen Fang

  Shandong University of Finance and Economics

  723 shared

• Feng Shen

  Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs

  719 shared

• Lujiang Xu

  Nanjing Agricultural University

  679 shared

• P.K. Sinha

  676 shared

• Alberto Veses

  Instituto de Carboquímica

  676 shared

• E. Aparicio

  Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila

  676 shared

• M.S. Callén

  676 shared

Labs

• Richard L. Smith Department of Statistics and Operations ResearchPI

Education

• Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering, Department of Chemical Engineering

  Georgia Institute of Technology

  1985