When he’s not collaborating on a customized sensor design, bringing a mass spectrometer back online or installing fiber internet at a research station, Jevon Smith sometimes uses his limited free time to volunteer in schools. The one question he is always asked by kids and educators alike is how he got to where he is today. His answer: Insane curiosity.
“I tell them to be insanely curious,” he says. “If you’re curious, it doesn’t matter what you need to learn. You’ll always have a natural desire towards discovery and understanding.”
STEM Roots to Geek Squad
Smith has always been that way – insanely curious. At an early age, he was intrigued by magnetism, energy and electricity, spending countless hours at the public library reading books about semiconductors and computer systems.
“I probably read the entire encyclopedia by the time I was 18,” Smith says. “I was the kid taking apart radios, record players and anything with a circuit board while watching Saturday morning cartoons.”
Coming from a long line of educators, Smith’s community in Fayetteville, North Carolina, was deeply rooted in educational opportunities as school became an extension of his family. His mother, a K-5 educator of nearly 30 years, always dared him to dream big. His aunt, a former trustee at Fisk University, also motivated him to pursue a career in STEM. By all accounts, he seemed poised for a life of the mind.
Before working at NC State University as the manager for research computing with the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, Smith had a dynamic career working for Best Buy’s Geek Squad. During his freshman year at Fayetteville State University, he started working part-time at Best Buy to help pay for school.
“It felt like a home for like-minded geeks and computer nerds,” Smith says.
He went on to become one of Best Buy’s most awarded employees during nearly 13 years of employment. Smith helped draft the company’s first cybersecurity policy in 2005 and was a launch director for the company’s Geek Squad division. Smith traveled across the country to shore up their strategy for becoming the world leader in consumer technology and support.
After winning five company achiever awards, Smith was awarded the Brad Anderson Legacy Stock Award in 2010, the highest honor any Best Buy employee can receive.
Using Tech to Accelerate Change
Smith’s flourishing career at Best Buy was interrupted by what he considered a higher call to service. A grassroots political movement was brewing to reduce crime and improve the quality of life for residents in his hometown of Fayetteville. Smith was recruited to join a crime reduction task force composed of city leaders, lawyers, business executives, sheriff’s deputies, police officers and county commissioners. He left Best Buy to join the cause.
“The opportunity to be involved in something that had such an intrinsic impact was too big to ignore,” Smith says. “I was immediately sold.”
Smith led the technical team that used a data-driven approach to fighting crime. As part of their efforts, the task force supported a candidate for the sheriff in Cumberland County, buth the campaign lost by a narrow margin.
“It was an extremely painful time,” Smith says. “In our minds, we had the advantage, the data, the technology, the people and the experience to win. So much energy and effort put towards such a noble cause ended so abruptly.”
But that loss would be NC State’s gain. After the campaign, Smith took his first of many roles at NC State as a CALS IT Help Desk supervisor, which set him on a path to helping future-proof agriculture.
A New IT Approach
Smith says he brought Best Buy’s principles of customer centricity to NC State and CALS. He lived those principles by spending hours in the offices of department heads and faculty members, trying to understand their challenges.
“I spent my first year at NC State asking people, ‘Why are things done this way?’ I think that insane curiosity allowed me to build relationships with people who could see I was authentically interested,” Smith says.
CALS IT underwent a significant overhaul under Smith’s leadership between 2015 and 2020. In that time, the group became more centralized and went from serving one academic department to supporting nine out of 12.
“It was a shift in both philosophy and approach. Instead of reacting to inquiries of support, we needed to integrate technology more proactively into all functions of the college,” Smith says. “I knew sitting in front of a computer all day was not in the cards. I had to be where the challenges were.”
During his tenure, he has launched and improved the technological capabilities of landmark college initiatives like the NC Food and Innovation Lab, Howling Cow Creamery, the Sensory Service Center, the Dinah E. Gore Research and Teaching Kitchens, the IR4 Project, and many others.
No Shortage of Dreams
Since 2022, Smith has been the manager of Research Computing, a new team and role that Smith helped develop after his many conversations identified a need for research-specific IT support.
“My daughter would tell you I fix keyboards,” Smith jokes. “But what I really do is work at the intersection of agriculture, life sciences and technology. It’s much broader than working on independent computers. Technical advancements necessitate designing complex computing pipelines for areas like bioinformatics research and genome editing.”
Smith describes his role as a novel experiment to create a niche group of people in the college’s IT department solely focused on research for all 12 academic departments, 18 research stations and four field labs, as well as its interdisciplinary initiatives.
Part of this work requires managing controlled environment spaces like greenhouses and growth chambers alongside life sciences equipment like mass spectrometers, DNA sequencers and gas chromatographs. The research computing team works hard to keep their computing platforms running properly. The work is expected to accelerate system recovery time from days to under an hour.
Smith is eager to help other colleges and universities jumpstart their own research computing teams and has traveled around the country speaking at conferences to do just that. His next project that will kick off this year is integrating the research computing team into the pre-award process for research grants.
“These problems are so complicated that it does take a diverse set of individuals to tackle them all. That expertise even has to come from outside of NC State,” Smith says. “We’re not doing this in isolation and are actually reaching out to the most influential and powerful companies in the world to help us with these problems.”
And Smith has no shortage of dreams for tackling them. What will a farm look like in 2050? He envisions a world in which farms house their own miniature agricultural data center hubs to power a new wave of sensors, data aggregation, AI and machine learning for real-time, data-driven decision-making in the field.
“This is just the beginning,” Smith says. “What you’re going to see over the next three years is an explosion of new capabilities that are going to really push NC State and CALS to the forefront of this agricultural and technological revolution. We are just getting started.”
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