From 1907 to 1910, Smith led the scientific party aboard the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries (successor organization of the U.S.

Fish Commission) research ship Albatross during her two-and-a-half-year expedition to the Philippine Islands.

With Charles Haskins Townsend he wrote '"The Pacific Salmons'" section of Trout and Salmon (New York: Macmillan, 1902), a volume of Caspar Whitney's prestigious American Sportsman's Library.

After he was pressured to resign from that position, he moved to Siam (Thailand in those days) during the reign of King Rama VI and was the first director general of Department of Aquatic Animal Conservation (now Department of Fisheries), during the reign of the King Rama VII (1926).

[3] Smith moved back to the United States in 1933 and was curator of zoology at the Smithsonian Institution[4] until his death in Washington, D.C. in 1941.