2012 Outstanding Alumnus Award Winner
With his sights focused on landing on the moon, Dr. Joseph A. Smith wanted to be an astronaut, so he began college studying aerospace physics. After the death of his father, “I decided upon medicine while still a freshman in college,” he says. “I wanted to be better than the doctors who cared for my father.
“As an intern, I scrubbed in on an 11-hour bladder removal and reconstruction surgery. It seemed like the most complex operation I had seen. I was convinced.”
Upon receiving his medical degree from the University of Tennessee Health Science Center, Dr. Smith completed two years of surgery residency at the University of Texas Southwestern, urology residency at the University of Utah, and a fellowship in urologic oncology at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York.
Continually humbled by his first job as a teen sorting laundry at a hospital, Dr. Smith holds the distinguished William L. Bray Chair in Urologic Surgery at Vanderbilt University, where he serves as professor of surgery and chairman of the Department of Urologic Surgery. For 26 consecutive years, Dr. Smith has been on the Best Doctors in America list of Castle Connolly. He also was listed among the Top 5 surgeons for cancer care in the country by Time magazine. Under his leadership, the department is recognized as a Top 10 national program by U.S. News & World Report.
Dr. Smith has dedicated countless hours of service as president of various professional organizations, including the Southeastern Section of the American Urological Association, the Society of Urologic Oncology, and the American Board of Urology. He also served as chairman of the Residency Review Committee of the American Board of Medical Specialties. An author of six books, Dr. Smith is an associate editor of the Journal of Urology and the editor of Hinman’s Atlas of Urologic Surgery (the most widely used surgical text in urology).
If he wasn’t a doctor, “I would still want to be an astronaut. And I still hope to make it to the moon one day.”
He also intends to check dunking a basketball and climbing Mt. Everest off his list.
Dr. Smith has already enjoyed African safaris and spending summers as a park surgeon at Yellowstone National Park.
“The wonders of the world are everywhere,” he says, “and I try to not wait for them, but instead experience them daily” with his wife, Barbara, their three children, and three grandchildren.
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