Rate My Professor Richard Smith

Professor J. Richard Smith is Professor of Practice at Imperial College London in the Faculty of Medicine. He graduated from the University of Glasgow in 1982 and completed further training in Scotland before moving to London in 1988. He held positions at St Mary’s Hospital and became a consultant at Chelsea & Westminster Hospital in 1993, later serving as chief of gynaecology there. He moved to Hammersmith and Queen Charlotte’s Hospitals, where he specialises in gynaecological oncology, including gestational trophoblastic disease, ovarian germ cell tumours, cervical cancer, and vulval disease. He co-invented the radical abdominal trachelectomy procedure for fertility preservation in cervical cancer cases and the modified Strassman procedure for uterine tumours. His research has focused on uterine transplantation since the late 1990s, leading the UK’s first living donor womb transplant in 2023 as part of the Womb Transplant UK programme, which he founded and chairs.

Professor Smith is also an Honorary Consultant in Transplantation Surgery at Oxford University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust and previously served as Adjunct Associate Professor at New York University School of Medicine from 2001 to 2021. He has authored or edited multiple medical textbooks, including four editions of an Atlas of Gynaecological Oncology and books on women’s cancers, and has published over 200 peer-reviewed papers. He maintains interests in doctor-patient communication, colposcopy, pelvic pain, and endometrial stem cell research.