Smita joined the School of Law as a Lecturer in Intellectual Property Law in September 2008. She completed an LLB (Hons) from University of Buckingham in 2002 and an LLM from the University of Cambridge in 2003. She gained legal experience as a practising advocate in Corporate and commercial law, in the High Court at Calcutta before starting a PhD at Queen's University Belfast in 2005.

For her doctoral research she has taken a socio-legal approach to examine authors' rights under copyright legislation and has recently completed a qualitative study exploring the perspective of digital artists as to the concept of authorship and their use of present copyright legislation. Her research interests include applicability of empirical research, particularly socio-legal methodologies in addressing questions on copyright law and policy as to new types of creative content and exploring connections between Intellectual property law and new forms of property and culture through perspectives of creators and users.