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Julie Swann

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A headshot of Julie Swann standing in front of a cinder block wall.

Industrial and Systems Engineering

ISE Department Head

Interim Asst Vice Chancellor for Research Computing and Data

A. Doug Allison Distinguished Professor

Industrial and Systems Engineering

Fitts-Woolard Hall 4121

919.515.6423

Bio

Julie Swann is the department head and A. Doug Allison Distinguished Professor of the Fitts Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering. She is an affiliate faculty member in the Joint Department of Biomedical Engineering at both NC State and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Before joining NC State, Swann was the Harold R. and Mary Anne Nash Professor in the Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. There she co-founded and co-directed the Center for Health and Humanitarian Systems (CHHS), one of the first interdisciplinary research centers on the Georgia Tech campus. Starting with her work with CHHS, Swann has conducted research, outreach and education to improve how health and humanitarian systems operate worldwide.

Health and Humanitarian Research

Swann is a Fellow of IISE, a member of INFORMS and a research leader in applying analytics and systems approaches to make health care and supply chains more efficient, effective, or equitable. Her work as a systems engineer with analytics skills spans public health, public policy, epidemiology, infectious disease, supply chain management and disaster response. Recent activities include:

  • Conducting analytics to reduce adverse events and unplanned admissions to hospitals and skilled nursing facilities for the Medicare system, as part of a data innovation team in the 2019-2020 CMS national innovation challenge. This work includes examining the role of the CMS quality ranking systems on adverse events and unplanned admissions.
  • 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.
  • Analyzing the disease’s epidemiology and public health impacts the spread of a pandemic, including influenza (2007 to current) and Covid-19 (2020 to present).
  • Educating practitioners from non-profits, industry, government agencies, etc., that conduct emergency management and disaster response on crucial aspects of supply chain management.
  • Quantifying the return on investment from decisions by state agencies to improve pediatric asthma.

Julie Swann discusses her health and humanitarian research

Collaborations

Swann has collaborated widely with organizations such as:

  • The American Red Cross
  • The Carter Center
  • CARE USA
  • The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
  • Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta
  • Emory University Hospital
  • State Departments of Public Health
  • and many other 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. This contribution includes teaching in the MASHLM program in Lugano, Switzerland, and co-chairing the annual Health and Humanitarian Logistics Conference.

Media Coverage

Swann has served as an expert for the media, appearing in sources such as:

Julie Swann talks with WRAL about COVID-19

To see her full list of media appearances with links to each publication, view ISE’s In the News page.

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Julie Swann Headshot
Julie Swann Presenting at a Conference
Julie Swann at a Conference
Julie Swann Teaching Class
Julie Swann talking with Alumni
Julie Swann being interviewed by the media

Education

Ph.D. Industrial Engineering/Management Science Northwestern University 2001

M.S. Industrial Engineering/Management Science Northwestern University 1998

B.S. Industrial Engineering Georgia Institute of Technology 1996

Area(s) of Expertise

Swann is a research leader in using mathematical modeling to enable supply chain systems and health care to become more efficient, effective, or equitable. Recent collaborations have been to quantify the return on public investments to improve pediatric asthma, plan for infectious disease outbreaks, analyze administrative claims data from Medicaid patients across the US, and design systems with decentralized decision-makers.

Publications

View all publications

Grants

Date: 02/01/22 - 7/31/23
Amount: $200,000.00
Funding Agencies: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

The COVID-19 Simulation Integrated Modeling (COVSIM)CovSim2 team brings deep experience in infectious disease modeling and engagement with public health agencies, including work on COVID-19 (as part of first year of funding from CDC and CSTE 2020-2021) and on influenza pandemic (2007 to 2018). Across the team, there is also previous experience in modeling and decision-making for cholera, malaria, HIV, Hepatitis C, guinea worm disease, obesity, diabetes, sepsis, and more. We pair our deep computational experience with domain expertise in public health, communication, and visualization to elicit feedback and disseminate results. Our team has extensive experience building complex models in a variety of clinical and policy settings and using them to inform decision making.

Date: 06/01/21 - 5/31/23
Amount: $100,000.00
Funding Agencies: National Science Foundation (NSF)

The objective of this RAPID project is to identify and document possible issues of the existing COVID-19 vaccine distribution and administration systems and propose solutions through collecting national vaccine distribution and administration data and quantifying lead times and various performance measures. We plan to collect day-to-day vaccine allocation and shipment data (to track the supply over time) and vaccine administration data from CDC and States. More information on data elements is available in the research plan section. While this data is available at CDC now, it is not available to the public and it is not archived for a long time (as is the case for N1H1 vaccination data) and will be lost if not collected now. We will work with reporters that have collaborated with us before to create a freedom of information act (FOIA) request to access and archive the data. State record this data as well; however, they do not follow a consistent way of reporting the data, and the majority of them only report cumulative data. It is not certain whether they record the daily data, and if so, how long they keep it. As such, the daily data is at great risk of being lost if not collected as soon as possible and many important vaccination data and trends will be lost if the day-to-day data is not available.

Date: 08/15/22 - 5/15/23
Amount: $86,347.00
Funding Agencies: Arizona State University (ASU)

To support graduate students to build a knowledge graph in manufacturing supply chain - 1) integrating data from unstructured sources contained within manufacturing company websites; 2) building a knowledge Graph from a large scale text mining of manufacturing science literature.

Date: 08/24/21 - 2/23/23
Amount: $619,908.00
Funding Agencies: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention������������������s (CDC) ILINet surveillance system plays an important role in our understanding of influenza dynamics and is used to identify seasonal influenza disease burden, severity, epidemic onset and seasonality, but it suffers from reporting delays and limited, opportunistic sampling of the population. FluView for Fall 2020 shows relatively few visits for ILI. To date, approaches based on EHRs or medical claims have been found to be cumbersome for implementation on a dynamic, rolling horizon basis. Moreover, they usually require deep technical know-how to update when diagnosis codes change or new billing is added such as for telemedicine. We propose to use a data factory approach that provides dynamic, easy to update reporting, based on the Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) standards for EHR. We will demonstrate the capabilities of the system using data from MedStar Health, a 10-hospital system serving Maryland, Virginia, and District of Columbia.

Date: 08/15/20 - 7/31/22
Amount: $106,506.00
Funding Agencies: National Science Foundation (NSF)

Matriculation and Well-Being Under Emergent Events (MWEE), will harness data from four campuses, engage communities and encourage the development of processes and actions to address this global challenge and answer questions such as: Can we measure and assess our ability to create virtual community through synchronous and asynchronous learning? Can we use data to inform real time risk stratification within campus community? Can we evaluate the effect of social distancing policies enacted on campuses? In doing so, we expect universities to be able to layer the results with data from their campuses to predict retention and graduation rates given emergent events including COVID-19.

Date: 10/01/20 - 1/31/22
Amount: $467,217.00
Funding Agencies: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

While current models of the COVID-19 pandemic have been helpful for initial national and state-level planning, the ability of local government, public health, and health care system leaders to utilize these simpler models to evaluate specific containment, mitigation, and operational strategies is limited. Next-level decision support models need to be representative of the local population and environment, and include interactions between people, resources, and policies. Our multidisciplinary team proposes to develop an integrated simulation model that captures both COVID-19 progression within an individual, within census tracts, and aggregated to counties and the state level. Key elements include socio-demographics such as age, gender, race, and geographic information that locates individuals within households, workplaces, and schools. Example performance measures of the robabilistic forecasts include cases, hospitalizations, deaths over time and by location. Interventions will be incorporated such as school closures, distancing, face coverings, therapeutics, and vaccinations, to result in averted cases, hospitalizations, and deaths. Our proposal builds on established work in influenza and COVID-19, developing and communicating forecasts to key decision makers. The team will conduct interviews with stakeholders to ensure relevance of policies and results. The focus is on rapid development and innovation with communication across multiple platforms.

Date: 10/05/20 - 9/27/21
Amount: $124,630.00
Funding Agencies: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

The CDC Global Health division focuses on control and/or elimination of vaccine-preventable diseases to reduce death and disability globally. Their focus areas include polio eradication, measles elimination, control of rubella, pertussis, Hepatitis B, haemophilia influenza type B, and other diseases in Tier 1 countries such as Afghanistan, Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, India, Indonesia, Nigeria, Pakistan, and the Philippines. Our project goal is to (1) construct a framework to identify the different outputs of our interventions in metrics of health impact, determine how these outputs relate to our selection of interventions, and what other variables affect these results; (2) build disease modeling tools to quantify the effects of vaccination coverage on specific diseases and populations; and (3) develop an Operations Research framework to link the two together to support the selection of effective immunization programs that will maximize the efficiency, effectiveness, and equity of vaccine delivery.

Date: 04/01/17 - 6/30/19
Amount: $19,509.00
Funding Agencies: Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Incorporated (IEEE)

This proposal is for a services agreement between IEEE and NC State University. The agreement is for NC State faculty and other personnel to provide editorial services for the IEEE Transactions on Human-Machine Systems. David Kaber is currently serving as the Editor-in-Chief for this Journal. IEEE Technical Activities Operations will provided funding to NC State for Dr. Kaber to hire a bi-weekly employee to support journal operations, as detailed in the Statement of Work and the Budget Justification statement. Dr. Kaber will continue to manage the journal technical operations, with the help of the journal administrator, through December of 2018.

Date: 06/01/18 - 5/31/19
Amount: $50,765.00
Funding Agencies: Southeastern Regional Medical Center (SRMC)

The Southeastern Regional Medical Center (SRMC) in Lumberton, NC, would like to improve throughput of patients within the Emergency Department (ED). The goal is to have 60% of patients exit the ED within 180 minutes; the current performance is that 40% of patients do so. Ultimately, measures such as this one drive patient satisfaction with the hospital, and thus the measure is a priority of the hospital leadership. Based on benchmarking and discussions with other hospitals, SRMC has asked for analytics and systems engineering approaches to assist in meeting their performance goal. The ISE team proposes engineering analytics and modeling to assist in understanding what actions will improve patient throughput in the ED to meet the performance goal of the hospital.


View all grants
  • 2022 | Fellow, American Institute for Medical and Engineering
  • 2021 | Elected as 2022 Chair of the Institute of Industrial and Systems Engineers Council of Industrial Engineering Academic Department Heads
  • 2020 | Finalist in Best Service Science Paper Competition, Service Science Section Cluster of INFORMS
  • 2020 | Volunteer Service Award, Institute of Industrial Systems Engineers
  • 2020 | Fellow, Institute of Industrial Systems Engineers
  • 2012 | GT College of Engineering 's Georgia Power Professor of Excellence
  • 2011 | Atlanta Busines Chronicle's 40 under 40 Award
  • 2007 | Joe Magnan Alumna of the Year for Tattnall Square Academy
  • 2006 | Council of Outstanding Young Engineering Alumni of Georgia Tech Inductee
  • 2004 | CAREER Award, National Science Foundation
  • 2004 | Charles McKuen Award for outstanding contributions to General Motors
  • 2002 | Council of Logistics Management Dissertation Award