BGD

Over his career, Swanson has focused on demography. His research ranges from the formal (mathematical/theoretical) to the applied perspective, but also includes the development of methods as well as research in the areas of social demography and population health.  He is: (1) an elected Fellow of the Mississippi Academy of Sciences; (2) 2020-21 Edward A. Dickson Emeritus Professor of Sociology, University of California Riverside; (3) Research Associate, Center for Population Research, Portland State University; (4) Faculty Affiliate, Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology, University of Washington; and (5) Research Fellow, Social Science Research Center, Mississippi State University.

He has served on the external advisory committee for the Geospatial and Population Studies Center at the University of New Mexico and the advisory board for Penn State University’s online MA Program in Applied Demography as well as a member of the U. S. Census Bureau’s Scientific Advisory Committee for six years (2004-10), chairing the committee for two of them (2009-2010). He has been in a number of professional association roles, including twice acting as the Secretary-Treasurer (1995-7 and 2003-7) of the Southern Demographic association, and as serving as the editor of its official journal, Population Research and Policy Review (2004-7). More recently, he served on the program committee for the 2022 annual meeting of the Population Association of America and also served on the program committees for the 2019 Conference on Population and Public Policy and both the 2020 and 2017 annual meetings of the Population Association of America.

Swanson has served as an expert witness and testified before Congress, state legislatures, and local government bodies. In addition to having been a Fulbright specialist in Demography, he has received two Fulbright awards and more than $2.3 million in grants and contracts. Swanson has produced over 117 refereed sole- and co-authored journal articles and nine books, mainly dealing with demography, especially methods for doing small area estimation and forecasting. He also has edited or co-edited four additional books and Google Scholar shows more than 6,500 citations to his work. During a six-week period in the Spring of 2020, Swanson wrote 12 articles on the COVID-19 Pandemic for Northwest Citizen. With Peter Morrison, he wrote “Sanctuary Cities Get a Census Bonus,” an op-ed piece that appeared in the 16 July 2019 issue of the Wall Street Journal.

Among other professional recognitions, he: (1) served as a “summer at census” scholar in June, 2019, U.S. Census Bureau; (2) received the Terrie award in 1999, 2016 and again in 2022 for presenting the best paper in state and local demography at the annual conference of the Southern Demographic Association; and (3) received a Vice-Presidential “Hammer Award” in 1998 for work on the development of the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey.

In addition to UC Riverside,  he served as an instructor for the Penn State online MPS degree in Applied Demography, a visiting professor at Aoyama Gakuin University in Tokyo,  Dean at the Helsinki School of Economics and Business Administration (now part of Aalto University), Professor & Chair of the Sociology/Anthropology Department at the University of Mississippi, Associate Professor of Sociology at Pacific Lutheran University, Assistant Professor at Bowling Green State University, Senior Scientist at Science Applications International Corporation,  the State Demographer of Arkansas, the State Demographer of Alaska, and a Research Investigator with the Washington State Office of Financial Management’s Population, Enrollment, and Economic Studies Division. His B.Sc. is from Western Washington State College (now known as Western Washington University), and his Ph.D. and M.A. are from the University of Hawai’i. He also holds a Graduate Diploma in Social Sciences from the University of Stockholm.