Professor David R. Smith completed his undergraduate studies at Acadia University, a small liberal arts college in rural Nova Scotia, and then moved an hour’s drive down the road to Dalhousie University for his PhD. His doctoral work explored the bizarre and eccentric organelle genomes of green algae and land plants. David continued his studies on genome architecture in algae as an NSERC and Killam postdoctoral scholar in the Biodiversity Research Centre at the University of British Columbia. Prof. Smith's research program at Western will focus on genetic diversity and genome evolution in microbial eukaryotes, with particular focus on species that have lost the ability to perform photosynthesis, such as Polytomella—David’s all-time favorite organism.