Robert "Bob" Benjamin Smith

Robert (Bob) Benjamin Smith, Ph.D., sociologist and statistician, died on Tuesday, August 29, 2017, at age 81. The son of Norman Harold Smith and Marion (Lurie) Smith, he was born in Grand Rapids, MI and raised in Chicago. Smith earned a doctorate in sociology at Columbia University, and then, for nearly a decade, taught political sociology and research methods at the University of California, Santa Barbara, taking one year off to teach as a Senior Fulbright-Hays Lecturer at the State University of Ghent, Belgium. He treasured the lasting friendships he formed with members of the Ghent Jewish community, and strived to reinvigorate those friendships by occasionally revisiting them.

Always open to new ideas and acquiring news skills, he worked in applied research after leaving Santa Barbara, chiefly at Aetna Health Plans, Middletown, CT and Liberty Mutual Insurance Group, Weston, MA, but he also enjoyed work at Cytel Statistical Software and Services, Cambridge, MA, and the University of Cambridge-MIT Institute, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Smith was an avid reader and dedicated researcher. He edited The Handbook of Social Science Methods (in three volumes) and he wrote three books (most recently, Social Structure and Voting in the United States) and dozens of articles. He greatly benefitted from, and served as the president of, the Boston chapter of the American Statistical Association.

Above all, Smith loved life. He derived great joy from his grandsons, children, and friends, and from music, art, travel, and swimming. He treated family and friends with wit, humor, joy, and optimism, and to the end he treated others with kindness and generosity. For six years, he determinedly fought the heart failure that finally took his life. He was grateful for the extraordinary care of the nurses and physicians, especially Dr. Jagmeet Singh, at Massachusetts General Hospital,

Smith is survived by his wife of 33 years, Joanna (Flug Handlin) Smith, by two children from a previous marriage, Sarah Marielle Smith and Noah David Smith, their spouses, Vinod Parmeshwar and Elizabeth Labovitz Smith, and grandsons Jay and Dev Parmeshwar and Adam, Eli, and Isaac Smith. His sister, Barbara Willenson and her husband Kenneth reside in Milwaukee, WI.

Funeral services and shiva were private. A memorial service is being planned for a later date. In lieu of flowers, remembrances may be made to the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, P.O. Box 5028, Hagerstown, MD 21741 and the American Civil Liberties Union, c/o the Gift Processing Department, 125 Broad Street, 18th Floor, New York, NY 10004.