Sybil Laura Smith

Smith was born in Gardner, Massachusetts, the daughter of Henry Hill Smith and Florence I. Morse Smith. She graduated from Smith College in 1904.^[2] She earned a master's degree at Columbia University in 1908.^[3]

Smith was a school teacher after college.^[1] She was a home economics specialist and principal experiment station administrator^[4] who worked in the USDA's Office of Experimental Stations in the 1930s and 1940s.^[5] She spoke and wrote on nutrition,^[6] including on the vitamin levels in preserved foods, during the Great Depression and World War II, and published compilations of home economics research.^[7] She also spoke on several radio programs about her work,^[8][9] and traveled nationally to visit USDA experiment stations.^[4] In 1951 she received an honorary doctorate from the University of Massachusetts.^[10] She encouraged the work of other women in food science, including Helen Parsons and Abby Marlatt.^[11]

• The Vitamins (1922, with Henry Clapp Sherman)^[12]
• "Vitamins A, B, and C" (1926)^[13]
• Vitamins in Food Materials (1929)^[14]
• "Betterment of the Rural Home" (1934)
• "Research on nutrition of young women" (1937, radio presentation)^[8]
• "A Third Shelf of Home Economics Research" (1938)
• "Human Requirements of Vitamin C" (1938)^[15]
• "Vitamin Needs of Man: Vitamin C" (1939)^[16]
• "Research in Home Economics at the Land Grant Institutions, 1939-40" (1939, compiler)
• "Consumer and Family Problems" (1939)
• "Experiment station research on war problems in the home" (1942, with Georgian Adams)^[17]
• Experiment Station Research on the Vitamin Content and the Preservation of Foods (1944, with Georgian Adams)^[18]

Smith lived in Washington, D.C. with her partner, chemistry teacher Elizabeth I. Gatch, at least from 1920 to 1950.^[19] Gatch died in 1957,^[20][21] and Smith died in 1962, in her early eighties.