Julie L. Swann, PhD
Department Head and A. Doug Allison Distinguished Professor
Edward P. Fitts Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, North Carolina State University
Affiliate/Adjunct, Biomedical engineering, NC State and University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill
Julie Swann is the A. Doug Allison Distinguished Professor and Department Head of the Fitts Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering at North Carolina State University and an affiliate faculty of the Department of Biomedical Engineering (joint between NC State and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill). Prior to joining NC State, she was the Harold R. and Mary Anne Nash Professor in the Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where she co-founded and co-directed the Center for Health and Humanitarian Systems (CHHS), a world-renown interdisciplinary center that engages in research, outreach, and education to improve the operations of health and humanitarian systems, domestically and internationally.
Dr. Swann is an expert in analytics in operations research, especially across supply chains and health systems. She has been conducting analysis of the epidemiology and public health impacts of the disease spread of a pandemic including influenza (2007 to current) and Covid-19 (2020 to current), with colleagues from Georgia Tech, NC State, and UNC-CH. In 2009-2010, she was on loan to the CDC as a Senior Science Advisor for the H1N1 pandemic response. Currently she is leading a team selected by the CDC and the Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists to develop forecasts and decision models to support state decision making during the Covid-19 pandemic in the US.
Dr. Swann has collaborated widely with organizations including governmental, non-profits, companies. Worldwide, she has contributed to the education of thousands of practitioners in health and humanitarian systems, through the co-creation and teaching in a professional certificate program at Georgia Tech, teaching in the MASHLM program in Lugano Switzerland, and through the co-chairing of the annual Health and Humanitarian Logistics conference. She has served as an expert for the media, appearing in sources such as The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, LiveScience, The Washington Post, Politico, The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Scientific American, FiveThirtyEight, The Hill, the Atlanta Journal and Constitution, the Raleigh News and Observer, CNBC, USA Today, and others.