Walter H. F. Smith is a geophysicist, currently working in NOAA's Laboratory for Satellite Altimetry. He was formerly Chair of the scientific and technical sub-committee of GEBCO. Smith earned a BSc at the University of Southern California, and an MA, MPhil and PhD degrees at Columbia University. He was a post-doctoral fellow at the Institute for Geophysics and Planetary Physics of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography until joining NOAA in 1992. He is a co-founder of the Generic Mapping Tools, and maintains the GSHHG.