David A. Swanson served as member of the U. S. Census Bureau’s Scientific Advisory Committee for six years and chaired the group for two years (2004-10). He also has served as: Program Organizer for the 2007 and 2010 Applied Demography Conferences; Publications Officer (2001-2) for the Government Statistics Section, American Statistical Association; Chair of the Applied Demography Committee of the Population Association of America (2000-1); Secretary-Treasurer of the Southern Demographic Association (1995-7 and 2003-7); and the editor of Population Research and Policy Review (2004-7). Most recently, he was a member of the Development Committee of the Population Association of America (2008-13) and served on the Program Committee for its 2017 Conference. He serves as a peer reviewer for the Republic of Georgia’s National Science Agency, the Rustavelli Foundation (2011-current).
Swanson has given hundreds of presentations before professional associations. In 2010, he presented “Developing Small Area Population Estimates for Use in Health Information Systems” in the Introductory Plenary Session at the 19th International Conference of the Forum for Interdisciplinary Mathematics, held at Patna University in India. The same year he gave the invited presentation, “Perspectives on the American Community Survey” at the 2010 Conference of the Latin American Association for Population Studies in Havana, Cuba. Also in 2010, he presented “New Directions for the Decennial Census?” in the Invited Session, What if the 2020 Census Was the First Census: What Would We do?, at the annual Conference of the American Statistical Association. At the invitation of the Edmonton Society of Demographers, he gave the keynote talk, “Demography: A Four-Field View,” at the 2011 Kalbach Conference, held at the University of Alberta. He also has given invited presentations at the University of California Irvine, University of Hawai’i, University of Michigan, Mikkeli Polytechnic College, Pennsylvania State University, University of Queensland, Statistics Canada, University of Texas – San Antonio, Valparaiso University, and the University of Washington.
In addition to his presentations, hundreds of reports, and 30 non-refereed journal articles, Swanson has authored or co-authored over 90 refereed journal articles, mainly dealing with demography, especially methods for doing small area estimation and forecasting. His demographic publications appear in a range of journals, including Canadian Studies in Population, Demography, Florida Scientist, Janasamkhya, Journal of the Mississippi Academy of Sciences, Latin American Antiquity, Ohio Journal of Science, Population Research and Policy Review, Population Review, Public Health Reports, Review of Economics and Finance, Social Indicators Research, Southern African Journal of Demography, Southern Economic Review, Survey Methodology, The American Statistician, The Journal of Economic and Social Measurement, and The Journal of Population Research. He also has written on teaching pedagogy, especially in regard to quantitative subjects, with articles appearing in Delta Education Journal, The Montana Professor, The American Statistician, and Voprosy Statistiki.
With Stan Smith and Jeff Tayman, he wrote State and Local Population Projections: Methodology and Analysis (2001) and its revision, A Practitioner’s Guide to State and Local Population Projections (2013); with Farhat Yusuf and Jo Martins, authored both An Introduction to Consumer Demographics and Behaviour: Markets are People (2011) and Methods of Demographic Analysis (2014); with Paula Walashek, wrote CEMAF as a Census Method: A Proposal for a Re-designed Census and an Independent Census Bureau (2011); with Dean Judson authored Estimating Characteristics of the Foreign Born by Legal Status: An Evaluation of Methods and Data (2011); and with Jeff Tayman, wrote Subnational Population Estimation (2012). He also wrote Learning Statistics: A Manual for Sociology Students (2012). With Jay Siegel, he edited The Methods and Materials of Demography, 2nd Edition (2004); with Steve Murdock, edited Applied Demography in the 21st Century (2009); and with Nazrul Hoque, edited Opportunities and Challenges for Applied Demography in the 21st Century (2012); He recently completed The Washington State Census Board and Its Demographic Legacy (2016) and The Frontiers of Applied Demography (2016).
Swanson has received more than $2.3 million in grants and contracts and was the Principal Investigator of a research project funded by the National Science Foundation to assess the demographic and social impacts of Hurricane Katrina on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. In addition to many media interviews, he has testified before the US Congress and state legislative bodies. Swanson also has served as an expert witness in court cases and is the recipient of two Fulbright awards. He also was a two-time co-recipient of the Terrie Award, which is given by the Southern Demographic Association for the best paper in applied demography presented at its annual conference. Swanson has served as a state demographer (Alaska, Arkansas, and Oregon), a Department Chair (University of Mississippi and Pacific Lutheran University) and a Dean (Helsinki School of Economics and Business Administration).
Swanson speaks, reads and writes Finnish poorly, but can speak, read, and write Swedish reasonably well. His Ph.D. and M.A. are from the University of Hawai’i (Sociology, with a concentration in Population Studies) and his B.Sc. is from Western Washington University (with a major in Sociology and a minor in Mathematics). Swanson also holds a graduate diploma in Social Sciences from the University of Stockholm..
