Joseph ("Joe") Smartt (9 September 1931 – 7 June 2013) was a British geneticist with major contributions to the knowledge of crop evolution, especially of grain legumes.
Born in West Ham, East London, Smartt graduated from Durham University in 1952 with a botany degree. He was a member of Hatfield College during his undergraduate studies. He then studied at Cambridge University (Christ's College) for a diploma in agricultural science.
In 1954, he went to Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia), where he bred groundnuts until 1961. He completed his PhD in the Department of Genetics at North Carolina State University (NCSU) in 1965; his thesis was a study on cross compatibility between the cultivated groundnut, Arachis hypogaea, and wild species.
Smartt joined Southampton University in 1967 as a lecturer in the Department of Botany. He was promoted to Reader in Biology in 1990. Southampton University awarded him a Doctor of Science (DSc) in 1989 for his work on the genetics and evolution of crop plants. He retired from Southampton in 1996.
Smartt authored two books on grain legumes, edited a major volume on groundnuts, and was invited to co-edit a second edition of the important Evolution of Crop Plants with Professor Norman Simmonds. As a researcher, his most influential work concerned the diversity, evolution, and domestication syndromes in grain legumes.
His hobby of goldfish breeding and judging generated a long-standing research interest in the genetics of goldfish, publishing two books on the subject and serving as scientific adviser to the Goldfish Society of Great Britain.