Dr. Smith is a Reader in Social Psychology and Deputy Head of Department at the Department of Psychology. She is a co-investigator of the Centre for Evidence and Research on Security Threats (CREST) https://crestresearch.ac.uk, and is joint Chief Editor of the British Journal of Social Psychology. She received her PhD in Social Psychology from the University of Exeter in 2008, and has published widely over the past 10 years on the psychology underlying social movements, collective action, and socialization. As a social and organizational psychologist, she has an established program of research examining how polarized groups emerge and evolve through intra- and intergroup interactions (both online and offline), and the implications of these processes for behavior. Dr Smith's research on polarization and radicalization has been funded by three major UK-based research councils and in 2016 she won a mid-career Fellowship from the British Academy to study the psychology of online radicalization.