NCCU Chapter Faculty Advisor Bio

Deborah E. Swain, PhD., is an Associate Professor in the School of Library and Information Sciences at North Carolina Central University in Durham, NC, and has over 20 years experience in process engineering, organizational design, business and technical training, and managing information projects. Swain has taught at UNC-Chapel Hill, NC State, and Campbell University. She has done research on social network analysis (SNA) for consultants on emergency response and Homeland Security in the US. Other research has included use and operational issues around electronic health records and data bases, such as the National Library of Medicine (NLM), online computational science information, such as CSERD, and collaboration in the design of digital libraries, such as iLumina at UNC-Wilmington.

In addition to her faculty position at NC Central University, she has served as Interim Associate Dean (2008-2010) and supported Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) grants to promote research in diversity and scholarship in the “library as place.” She completed her doctorate in Information Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (1999). She has an MA from UNC-CH in English and a BA from Duke University. She teaches graduate courses in information science, health informatics, human factors, visualization of data, knowledge-based systems, and project management.  She has worked as a systems engineer, information developer, consultant, and project manager for corporations such as IBM, AT&T, and Alcatel-Lucent Technologies/Bell Labs.  She has been evaluating and analyzing the use of electronic health records for many years giving presentations and attending discussions at ASIS&T, HIMSS and NCHICA meetings.

In 2017 her paper, “Advanced Human-Computer Interactions with a Patient Simulator: Moving towards a Smart Campus and a Learning Health System,” won best research paper at the International Conference on Knowledge Management (ICKM) in Dallas, TX. In 2018, she presented on Expert Systems and UX (User Experience) research to ICKM in Vancouver. She s very interested in Knowledge Management (KM) for research and teaching.

For more information, see: http://www.nccuslis.org/people/faculty/swain/index.htm

Email Address: dswain@nccu.edu