Sonya Teresa Smith is an American mechanical engineer whose research involves computational fluid dynamics and thermal management of electronics for air and space vehicles.
[1] She majored in mathematics at Valdosta State University, with an emphasis in computer science, and graduated with a B.S.
[3] Her dissertation, The Nonlinear Interaction of Goertler Vortices and Tollmien-Schlichting Waves in Compressible Boundary Layers, was supervised by Hossein Haj-Hariri.
[2] She was the first woman in mechanical engineering to earn tenure at Howard University, the first to become a full professor, and the first to become department chair.
[5] Smith was elected as president of Sigma Xi, an honor society for American scientists and engineers, for the 2020–2021 term.