David R. Smith is an American physicist and professor of electrical and computer engineering at Duke University in North Carolina and visiting professor at Imperial College London.
[1] Smith's research focuses on electromagnetic metamaterials, or materials with a negative index of refraction.
In 2000, as a postdoctoral fellow working in the laboratory of Professor Sheldon Schultz at UCSD, Smith and his colleagues discovered the first material that exhibited a negative index of refraction.
[5][6][7] Although the cloaking device had limited ability to conceal an object from light of a single microwave wavelength, the experiment was an initial demonstration of the potential of metamaterials, constructed composite materials with unusual optical properties, to behave in unique ways because of both their structural properties.
[6] In 2009, Reuters news service listed Smith in the Clarivate Citation laureates in Physics, which considers potential candidates for the Nobel Prize in Physics.