Keriayn Smith, PhD, is a scientist, data strategist, and founder working to unlock one of biology’s largest untapped frontiers: the noncoding genome. Most of the human genome does not code for proteins and has been dismissed as “junk DNA.” Dr. Smith has built her career showing that this “dark matter” is functional and full of regulatory potential. She also founded a startup to turn products of the dark genome into biomedical breakthroughs, and her work has spanned the wet lab, computation, and the boardroom.
At the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC), Dr. Smith is an Associate Professor in the School of Data and Information Sciences, with a secondary appointment in the Department of Genetics at the UNC School of Medicine. She is a Senior Research Scientist at the Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI), contributing data science and subject-matter expertise to large National Institutes of Health (NIH) Data Hub projects. She is also Co-Director for Training and Excellence of the RNA Discovery Center at the UNC Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center.
Her work has drawn support from the NIH, the National Science Foundation (NSF), and private philanthropy. The Hypothesis Fund chose her as one of six inaugural seed grant recipients for “Not Junk: Noncoding RNAs as Determinants of Cell Identity,” citing the boldness of the science and its potential long-term impact. She was invited to the NSF’s “Dark Dimensions of the RNA Regulome” Ideas Lab, an intensive cross-disciplinary workshop that led to a multi-institutional NSF award.
Dr. Smith pairs scientific rigor with a deep commitment to expanding who gets to do science. She founded the Society for Scientific Advancement (SOSA), a multinational 501(c)(3) nonprofit that provides educational programming and professional development to students and scientists from historically excluded and under-resourced communities in the United States and abroad. She served as SOSA’s Board Chair and has served on numerous boards and committees on and off campus.
Dr. Smith holds a B.Sc. and M.Phil. in Biochemistry from the University of the West Indies and a Ph.D. in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology from the University of Georgia. She also earned a Master of Quantitative Management in Business Analytics from Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business. Her expertise spans RNA biology, gene editing, epigenetics, stem cell biology, bioinformatics, and data analytics, giving her fluency where molecular biology, data science, and innovation meet.
