R. Tyson Smith conducts research in the areas of health, criminal justice, gender, social psychology, and the military. His first book, Fighting for Recognition, is based on a study of the meanings and motivations of young men who train and perform in community-level independent professional wrestling. He is writing a second book on veterans in the criminal justice system. He was an American Council of Learned Societies New Faculty Fellow at Brown University. Prior this he was a National Institute of Mental Health postdoctoral fellow at Rutgers University’s Institute for Health.