Thressa Smith was born in Santa Barbara, California in 1961 to intrepid parents and spent her childhood roving the Western United States. She attended the University of California at Davis, where she studied physiology with every intention of becoming a veterinarian. However, in her senior year in college she enrolled in an elective course in scientific research and was hooked.  She graduated from the University of California at Irvine with a Ph.D. in pharmacology and toxicology, studying changes that occur in brain neurochemicals associated with aging memory impairments. After thoroughly enjoying several postdoctoral fellowships researching the neurochemistry of memory, she met the man whom she would eventually marry (16 years later) and left scientific research to sail the oceans with him. Knowing it would be difficult to find work using her Ph.D. in remote islands, she became a PADI scuba diving instructor and later qualified as one of the rare female US. Coast Guard licensed boat captains for vessels up to 100 tons. In 1999 she and her future husband sailed from New York to South America with their Portuguese Water Dog and a cat aboard their 36-foot sailboat. They spent six incredible years in the Caribbean where Thressa captained, taught scuba diving, wrote for an online sailing magazine, blogged about her nautical adventures before the word blog was invented and collected experiences to transform into fiction.

Her varied degrees, licenses and explorations eventually formed the basis of her first medical thriller, Minimally Invasive which she recently finished. A synopsis and the first chapter are posted for your comments and a quick poll.

Currently, Thressa, her husband, their second Portuguese Water Dog and rescued cat live aboard their fixer-upper 44-foot sailboat near the eclectic island community of Galveston, Texas, where she is hard at work on her second novel, a memoir, tentatively titled A Casual Relationship with Truth.