Adele Smith Simmons (born June 21, 1941) is an American academic, business director, philanthropist, academic administrator, the third president of Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts, from 1977 to 1989 and the second president of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation from 1989 to 1999.

"[2] Simmons, born Adele Dunlap Smith, was born on June 21, 1941, in Lake Forest, Illinois, to Hermon Dunlap Smith, former president of Marsh & McLennan who died in 1983, and Ellen Thorne, an ornithologist who died in 1977.

She has two sisters, Deborah Haight and Ellen Buchen, and one brother, Farwell Smith.

[8] Simmons went on to work as a reporter for The Economist from 1968 to 1969, where she covered North Africa before returning to Cambridge, Massachusetts.

She serves as a director of the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, Synergos Institute, the Rocky Mountain Institute, the Global Fund for Women, the Union of Concerned Scientists, and The American Prospect.

In August 2013, Simmons and her husband, John, sold their 8,500-square-foot, six-bedroom Lincoln Park, Chicago home on Arlington Place for nearly $2.83 million.