Joseph Victor Smith FRS was a British mineralogist and crystallographer, best known for his work on feldspars and zeolites, [1] and on lunar samples returned during the Apollo missions.
He won a scholarship to Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge in 1945, where he studied natural sciences, specialising in physics and graduating in 1948.
In 1951 he married Brenda Wallis, and then sailed on the Queen Mary to take up a fellowship at the Geophysical Laboratory of the Carnegie Institute of Washington.
[2] At Chicago, Smith played a leading role in establishing instruments and capacity for the micro-analysis of materials.
After setting up an early electron microprobe, Smith later led the way for X-ray synchrotron analysis of a wide range of materials by establishing the Centre for Advanced Radiation Sources (CARS), using beamlines at the Advanced Photon Source and the Argonne National Laboratory.