Ian Smail

Ian Robert Smail is a British astrophysicist. He is Emeritus Professor of Physics at the Durham University Department of Physics, based in the Centre for Extragalactic Astronomy, itself part of the Ogden Centre for Fundamental Physics.

He has been ranked as one of the most highly-cited researchers in Space Sciences. He carried out his doctoral studies in Astronomy (1989–1993) at Durham University (University College), supervised by Richard Ellis. He received a Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award in 2013, and was named by Thomson Reuters as one of the world's most influential scientific minds the following year. In 2025 he was awarded the Herschel Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society.