Stanley G. Smith, 78, died June 1, 2010.

Smith was born on June 20, 1931, in Los Angeles, California. He was the son of Glen and Katherine Keck Smith. He was preceded in death by his sister, Lorraine Fetscher.

Smith received a B.S. degree from the University of California-Berkeley in 1953, where he carried out undergraduate research with Donald Noyce on the mechanism of aromatic semicarbazone formation using the Hammett relationship. Following two years in the U.S. Army he began graduate studies at UCLA. There he studied with Saul Winstein, among other things, the role of ion pairing and the ionizing power of solvents on anchimerically assisted solvolysis reactions. He received his Ph.D. in 1959.

Smith joined the faculty of the Department of Chemistry at the University of Illinois in 1960 and within three years had published three single authored papers including his first on what would become a seminal study on the mechanism of Grignard, organolithium, and lithium aluminum hydride addition to carbonyl compounds. This was made possible by his development of a scanning, infrared, stopped-flow spectrometer. He and his group subsequently carried out some of the earliest mechanistic studies on the addition of copper reagents to unsaturated ketones.

Smith was widely regarded as one of the brightest young practitioners in the area of physical organic chemistry and his studies included mechanistic work on solvolyses, alkylation, photochemical, rearrangement, and elimination reactions.

In 1968, Smith began researching the use of computers in chemical education, and in 1970 published in the Journal of Chemical Education a groundbreaking paper titled "Use of Computers in the Teaching of Organic Chemistry." This began a nearly 40-year effort to integrate computer-based technologies into the instruction of general and organic chemistry.

Milestones during that period included extending the PLATO-based instructional programs to microcomputers in 1979, incorporating videodisc technology in 1984, which enabled the integration of videos into the learning programs, and preparation of one of the first instructional CDs.

Smith's work was recognized with numerous awards including the EDUCOM/ENCRIPTAL Best Tutorial Software Award and Best Chemistry Software Award in 1987 and the Best Integrated and Best Chemistry Software in 1989. He was widely acknowledged as a pioneer in computer-assisted learning in chemistry. Indeed his programs have been widely adopted by universities, colleges, and secondary schools.

Smith was a Fellow of the Association for the Development of Computer-Based Instruction and the Sloan Foundation. He received the Chemical Manufacturing Association Catalyst Award in 1987, the IBM/EDUCOM Robinson Award for instructional computing in 1992, and in 1998 was awarded the George C. Pimentel Award from the American Chemical Society. In 1990, Smith was appointed Jubilee Professor in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and in 1995 was appointed as the first Murchison-Mallory Chair in Chemistry, a title he held for over a decade.

In 1996, Smith was presented a collection of letters by his former students, testimony to their loyalty and the high esteem in which they held him.

In 2006, the Department of Chemistry celebrated the 25th anniversary of the Chemistry Learning Center (CLC), a facility started and guided by Smith that has been a model for other universities.

Smith retired from the University of Illinois in August of 2006 after serving on the faculty for nearly 46 years. As an emeritus faculty member, he continued to assist the CLC and the Department of Chemistry in the instructional laboratory renovations.