Hedrick Smith, Pulitzer Prize-winning former New York Times correspondent and author of several best-selling books, has been correspondent and creator of five award-winning PBS prime-time series on major topics in the fields of politics, economics, foreign affairs and urban society as well as hosting several other documentary programs. Seeking Solutions is his sixth PBS series.

Mr. Smith was correspondent and executive producer of the PBS series Surviving The Bottom Line, which aired in January, 1998. The series examined the values and forces driving the new American economy and their impact on the lives of middle class Americans as well as how companies and communities form effective partnerships to save companies and jobs, and to prepare America's young people for the information age economy.

Mr. Smith served as correspondent and senior executive producer of a documentary and discussion series, The People And The Power Game, broadcast nationwide by PBS during the fall of 1996, as part of the PBS Election Project. The mini-series analyzed the four major power centers in the American system: the media; lobbies; Congress; and the presidency.

His series, Inside Gorbachev's USSR, won the DuPont-Columbia grand prize in 1991, for the most outstanding public affairs production on U.S. television. Two other series, The Power Game (1989) and Challenge To America (1994), also won international recognition. His inner city documentary, Across The River (1995), about community building in the crime plagued neighborhoods of the nation's capital, won several awards and serves as a model for Seeking Solutions. PBS viewers saw Mr. Smith for 25 years as a principal panelist on Washington Week in Review and have seen him recently as a special correspondent for The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer.

For 26 years a correspondent for The New York Times, in Washington, Moscow, Cairo, Saigon, Paris and the American South, Mr. Smith has published several national best selling books, including The Russians (1976), The Power Game: How Washington Works (1988) and The New Russians (1990). Rethinking America (1995) compares the economic cultures of America, Germany and Japan operating under the pressures of global competition.

In 1971, as chief diplomatic correspondent, Mr. Smith was a member of the Pulitzer Prize-winning team that produced the Pentagon Papers series. In 1974, he won the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting from Russia and Eastern Europe. As former New York Times Washington bureau chief and chief correspondent, Mr. Smith developed expertise on the U.S. government and national politics. His documentary series, The Power Game, and book by that title, are widely used in college and university courses on American government. He has covered eight U.S. presidents and interviewed five of the last six.

Hedrick Smith began his newspaper career with The Greenville (S.C.) News. After completing his B.A. at Williams College and doing graduate work at Oxford University, Mr. Smith worked from 1959 to 1962 for Universal Press International in Memphis, Nashville and Atlanta. He joined The New York Times in 1962.