David Swanson

Biography

David A. Swanson is: (1) Distinguished Professor Emeritus, University of California Riverside; (2) the 2021 Edward A. Dickson Emeritus Professor, University of California Riverside; (3) Research Associate, Population Research Center, 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. Swanson served as a member of the U. S. Census Bureau’s Scientific Advisory Committee for six years (2004-10) and chaired the committee for two (2009-2010). He has been in a number of professional association roles, including serving: as the general editor for Springer’s Applied Demography series; a member of the mortality expert panel of the Society of Actuaries Research Institute; as the Secretary-Treasurer (1995-7 and 2003-7) of the Southern Demographic association; and 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 in court proceedings and testified before Congress, state legislatures and local government bodies. He has received two Fulbright awards and more than $2.8 million in grants and contracts. Swanson has an extensive record of research that is summarized by ScholarGPS, which places Swanson as 56th among the world’s 60 most Highly Ranked Scholars in the field of demography: “His prolific publication record, the high impact of his work, and the outstanding quality of his scholarly contributions put him in the top 0.05% of all scholars worldwide.” He has produced 128 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 five additional books. Google Scholar shows more than 7,700 citations to his work. Among other professional recognitions, he: (1) was elected to the Washington State Academy of Sciences in July of 2023; (2) elected as a Fellow of the Mississippi Academy of Sciences in January, 2023; (3) served as a “summer at census” scholar in June, 2019, U.S. Census Bureau; (4) received the Terrie award three times, 1999, 2016, and 2022, for presenting the best paper in state and local demography at the annual conference of the Southern Demographic Association; (5) was selected for and participated in the 2004 RAND Summer Institute on Aging; and (6) 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, other positions he has held include serving 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 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.