Deborah E Swain
Dr. Deborah E. Swain, Ph.D., is a professor in the School of Library and Information Sciences at NCCU in Durham, NC. She has over 20 years of experience in process engineering, organizational design, business and technical training. She has managed information projects for corporations such as IBM, AT&T and Lucent Technologies/Bell Labs. In 1999, she completed her doctorate in Information Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She also has an M.A. from UNC-CH in English and a B.A. from Duke University.
Her professional career includes working as a systems engineer, technical editor and project manager. She has published articles and contributed chapters to books. Her areas of academic research are social network analysis, collaboration, digital libraries, health informatics and knowledge management. In addition to her faculty position at NCCU, Dr. Swain has also taught at UNC-Chapel Hill, NC State University and Campbell University. She teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in information science, knowledge bases and metadata.
Dr. Swain is an active member of the Association for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T), the International Conference on Knowledge Management (ICKM), the American Library Association (ALA), North Carolina Library Association (NCLA) and Special Library Association (SLA). She was conference chair of the ICKM in December 2020 and has presented papers and workshops at conferences for the ASIS&T, ICKM, STC and IEEE on knowledge management, use cases, database design, computer interfaces, information retrieval/indexing, online help design, expert systems, quality and process auditing, business communications and software engineering. She is now involved in research in health informatics and social network analysis (SNA) mapping for knowledge management in healthcare, communities, businesses and educational organizations.
Mobilizing Computable Biomedical Knowledge (MCBK)
Dr. Swain is the project director of the IMLS grant's Mobilizing Computable Biomedical Knowledge (MCBK) pilot training. She will lead the project, contributing research and expertise in knowledge management (KM), data analytics and health informatics; she also serves on MCBK workgroups. For more information about MCBK, please see the MCBK homepage.