MIE Professor Jim Smith Passes Away
Content
On February 7, Professor James MacGregor Smith of the UMass Amherst Mechanical and Industrial Engineering (MIE) Department passed away at his home in Amherst some five years after being diagnosed with Multiple Myeloma. Smith enjoyed a long and storied career at UMass in which he published more than 160 papers in peer-reviewed journals. He also published numerous books over the years, including a comprehensive handbook titled Introduction to Queueing Networks, which integrates queueing network theory and its practical applications in real-world design.
Some of his other published books include Stochastic Modeling in Manufacturing Systems; Combinatorial, Linear, Integer, and Nonlinear Optimization Apps; and a textbook on factory design that’s the foundation for senior Industrial Engineering capstone courses in the MIE department.
“Having known Professor Smith since my very first day at UMass in 1989, I hold nothing but utmost respect and tremendous admiration for him,” said MIE Department Head Sundar Krishnamurty. “In recent years, I had the privilege of getting to know Jim well, where I learned a lot about his passion for teaching and his unwavering commitment to students’ learning. Without a doubt, Jim’s legacy within the department will forever endure.”
Before, during, and after Smith’s 44-year tenure in the MIE department, he led a vibrant, wide-ranging, and fruitful life representative of his times. According to his obituary in the Daily Hampshire Gazette, he earned his M.S. degree in Architecture from the University of California Berkeley and in 1972 joined the faculty in the College of Architecture at the University of Illinois Champaign – Urbana.
According to the Gazette obituary, “James was a conscientious objector to the Vietnam War, and he performed his alternative service by heading up the Community Action Depot (CAD) design course, which provided technical support to the urban poor and minority neighborhoods of Champaign, Illinois. His work at the CAD ultimately led to the construction of a low-income housing project in downtown Champaign.”
Subsequently, Smith earned his Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Illinois Champaign – Urbana in 1978. Then, that fall, he came to UMass Amherst as a faculty member in what is now the MIE department.
Smith conducted widely recognized research on topological network design, facility layout and location, and stochastic network design and analysis problems. In particular, he was studying Steiner minimal tress in 3D, quadratic assignment, set-packing problems, state-dependent queueing network design and analysis, and finite buffer queueing network models.
Applications of Smith’s research include the design of manufacturing plants, healthcare facilities, and many other production- and service-oriented systems.
In addition to Smith’s intensive teaching and research at UMass, as the Gazette obit explained, he used his sabbaticals to teach and do research at Roskilde University in Denmark, the University of Melbourne in Australia, the Moscow State University in Russia, the Federal University of Minas Gerais in Brazil, and Jiao Tong University in Shanghai. He also held a Fulbright Fellowship at the University of Piraeus in Greece.
In addition, Smith remained a man of multiple dimensions to the end. As the Gazette story noted, “James loved opera, and he made an annual Columbus Day weekend trip to the Metropolitan Opera [in New York City] to see the Saturday opera and a jazz performance at one of the jazz clubs.” (February 2024)