[1] Smail attended Emmanuel College, Cambridge on a Hooper Scholarship, where he completed the Natural Sciences tripos, graduating with an M.A.
[2] He carried out his doctoral studies in Astronomy (1989–1993) at Durham University (University College), for a thesis entitled Gravitational Lensing by Rich Clusters, supervised by Richard Ellis CBE FRS.
[2] From 1993 to 1995 Smail was a NATO Advanced Research Fellow in the Physics, Maths and Astronomy Division at Caltech, and subsequently a Carnegie Fellow at the Observatories of the Carnegie Institution for Science.
[2] In 2001 Smail, alongside fellow Durham researcher Ben Moore, was one of the first recipients of the Philip Leverhulme Prize in the Astronomy and Astrophysics category.
[3] He received a Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award in 2013.