Dr. Melody Smith received her MD with Distinction in Research from the University of Texas Southwestern Medical School in Dallas. She also completed an internship and residency in Internal Medicine at the University Texas Southwestern. She subsequently moved to Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSK) to complete her fellowship in Hematology & Medical Oncology. She joined the faculty at MSK in 2015 as an Instructor of Medicine on the Adult Bone Marrow Transplant Service, and she was promoted to Assistant Member Level 1 in 2017. 

During her time as junior faculty at MSK, she obtained a Master of Science from Weill Cornell Graduate School of Medical Sciences in Clinical & Translational Investigation. She also conducted post-doctoral research in the lab of Marcel van den Brink, MD, PhD and she was co-mentored by Michel Sadelain, MD, PhD.

In September 2021, she joined the faculty at Stanford University as an Assistant Professor in the Division of Blood and Marrow Transplantation and Cellular Therapy in the Department of Medicine to establish her independent lab. As a physician-scientist, her research focuses on strategies to develop cellular immunotherapy from allogeneic as opposed to autologous sources. She also investigates the regulatory mechanisms for the impact of the intestinal microbiome on chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cell outcomes.