Joseph V. Smith, 78; was award-winning mineralogist

Early in his scientific career, geophysicist Joseph V. Smith found himself without a critical research tool. Unfazed, he built the needed X-ray generator from junk and chicken wire.

Dr. Smith brought that same no-nonsense ingenuity and determination to wide-ranging work that helped explain the origins of the moon and increase the yield of gasoline from oil.

"I'm a farmer's boy," Dr. Smith often said. "You get up in the morning and do what needs to be done."

Dr. Smith, a professor at the University of Chicago, died April 6 at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center of pneumonia. He was 78 and had moved to Brookline with his wife Brenda in late 2005 to be closer to his older daughter, Virginia Smith and her family.

In early 2006, after he fell and broke his hip while fixing Brenda's computer, he agreed to participate in a Boston Globe special report on the difficulties older patients face after hip fracture. Dr. Smith, who was then suffering from Parkinson's disease, fought his way back not only from the hip fracture, but from several heart attacks, returning home to work on a book about global warming.

"He was very strong and very stoic," said his wife. "He handled any difficulties in life the way he handled his illness."

Born in Derbyshire, England, he won scholarships to exam schools by studying old tests and reading science textbooks. He earned a doctorate in physics from Cambridge University and moved to the United States in 1951 with his wife. He taught briefly at Pennsylvania State University before moving to the University of Chicago, where he became a tenured full professor at the age of 32. He specialized in the crystal structure of minerals.

Dr. Smith wrote a definitive book on feldspar, one of the most abundant minerals in the Earth's crust. His work on porous minerals called zeolites led to improved techniques to harvest gasoline from petroleum and to make laundry detergents more environmentally sound by replacing phosphorus. He also was among the first group of scientists to analyze rocks brought back from the moon by the Apollo 11 mission, helping to unravel the moon's geologic origins.

"Joe was one of the great mineralogists of his time, both in an intellectual sense and a practical sense," said Peter Wyllie, a former geology colleague at the University of Chicago who is now retired from the California Institute of Technology. "He did first-rate science that was always at the forefront. And he pursued practical applications in a very powerful way."

Wyllie said Dr. Smith was also "always looking for the next, best way of studying minerals." In the early 1960s, he helped refine the electron microprobe, a tool used to identify the chemical makeup of solids. And in the 1980s, he helped found a center to promote access for scientists to a high-energy particle accelerator at Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois.

In 1982, he won the Roebling Medal for outstanding research, the highest award of the Mineralogical Society of America. He was also a fellow of the Royal Society, the scientific academy of the United Kingdom.

Dr. Smith described himself as impatient with students who required spoon-feeding, but he sought out poetry about rocks to help teach nonscientists about geology, according to his wife.

Throughout his life, he was concerned about the stewardship of the earth. In his speech accepting the Roebling Medal, he made a plea for shifting funds from "war machines" to science and maintained that "international ties between scientists can help establish that we all belong to one human race, and must learn to live in peace on this planet."

In recent years, he was working on a book that is part memoir, part ecological manifesto. In it, he said that society is wasting resources on war instead of protecting itself against hurricanes, tsunamis, and asteroids.

In his home life, he tried not to waste a minute and nearly always multitasked, doing a crossword puzzle while talking with his doctor, for instance. In Brookline, he often called across the street to recruit his grandson for a game of chess. He frequently strolled around the pocket park adjacent to his house and helped his daughter plant bulbs there last year.

Dr. Smith loved to travel and made frequent trips to the family farm in England as well as several cross-America drives. The focus of the trips was often geology, his wife said, which led to stops at the Grand Canyon, but also at more obscure locations such as a boulder field in Washington State.

"He was absolutely fascinated by most things and if it had a rock in it, it was even more fascinating," his wife said.

In addition to his wife and daughter Virginia, Dr. Smith leaves another daughter, Susan Smith Werther of Madison, Wis.; a brother, Frank of Whatstandwell, Derbyshire; a sister, Hilary Wellby of Crich, Derbyshire; and four grandchildren.

Funeral services are planned for late June in Crich. A memorial service will be held at a later date in Chicago.