Roger Kelly Smith holds advanced degrees in international politics from the London School of Economics (MSc) and Georgetown University (Ph.D.); in addition, he earned a law degree from the University of California at Los Angeles.

He taught international politics and American defense policy at the University of Massachusetts, while serving as the executive director of the Aspen Strategy Group, a nonpartisan Aspen Institute think tank examining national security matters. Concurrent with his Aspen appointment, he was a post-doctoral research fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and Center for International Affairs.

He has edited and contributed to collected works on the Gulf War, American grand strategy, and nuclear, chemical, and ballistic missile proliferation, and has published peer-reviewed articles on nuclear arms control in scholarly journals in the United States and the United Kingdom.

Before entering public service with the California Court of Appeal, he was in private practice as a civil litigator with several international law firms. His first novel, No Place to Die, a near future spy thriller, is about Jack Worker’s son, Jan, a Delta operator seconded to the CIA to guard a high-value Chinese defector.