Frank Fremont-Smith (3 March 1895 – 27 February 1974) was an American administrator, executive with the Josiah Macy, Jr. Foundation, president of British General Rees's World Federation of Mental Health, known together with Lawrence K. Frank as motivators of the Macy conferences,[1] and as promoter for interdisciplinary conferences as platforms for advancing knowledge.
[2] In that year he moved to become the medical director and the executive secretary of the Macy Foundation, where he started to evolve a problem-solving, multidisciplinary conference format.
[2] Fremont-Smith was familiar with what would become cybernetics' prehistory, because of his involvement in the 1930s in an informal conversational network around neurophysiology and the work of Walter Cannon on homeostasis.
[1] A second initiative he organized in the 1940s was a meeting about "physiological mechanisms underlying the phenomena of conditioned reflexes and hypnosis as related to the problem of cerebral inhibition.
"[3] This so-called "Cerebral Inhibition Meeting" was sponsored by the Josiah Macy Foundation attended by scientists like Gregory Bateson, and Margaret Mead, and five others.