Assistant Professor, Jenny Leigh Smith, joined the School of History, Technology, and Society in Spring 2009 bringing to Georgia Tech its first undergraduate classes in Russian history. Smith earned her PhD in History and Anthropology of Science, Technology and Society from MIT.

Most recently, she spent two years as a postdoctoral fellow and lecturer at Yale University in the Program in the History of Science and the History of Medicine. She has been published in an edited volume, Food Chains: Provisioning from Farmyard to Shopping Cart, and in the Modern Encyclopedia of Russian, Soviet, and Eurasian History.

With a broad focus in the history of technology and the environment, Smith's research areas include the history of modern technology, Russian and Soviet history, industrial food and agriculture, the environmental legacy of the Cold War, and the impact of impact of 20th century Russia's policies and industrialization on the environment of the far northern European countries.

Smith plans to create an international environmental history of the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard using Russian, Norwegian and Dutch archival records. Currently, she is making revisions on her first book Animal Farms, a study of the industrialization of Soviet agricultural and its impact on the environment and national diet. Smith shared an insight about Russian attitudes toward food; food scarcity is fresh in the minds of modern Russians so their view of diet is the inverse of the west - in Russia, fat is good. Food advertisements tout high fat-sugar dense foods as beneficial. Smith recently published a paper on one of Russia's favorite health foods "" ice cream "" citing a dairy technologist who wrote that ice cream "is a healthy and delicious food...and should be included in the menu at breakfast, lunch and dinner."