Dr. Ben Smith obtained his bachelor’s degree in Mathematics from the University of Plymouth and later a master’s degree in Physics from Cardiff University. He received his doctorate from the University of Leicester for his research on the surprisingly complex flow around a rotating sphere. He is now a postdoctoral researcher at UW-Madison investigating bio-physical processes and wave-ice interactions in lakes. Other interests include boundary layer flows, hydrodynamic stability, computational fluid dynamics and numerical methods for partial differential equations.