Professor Swanson is an accomplished scholar, legal practitioner and scientist whose chief interests are in intellectual property law, the history of science, medicine, and technology and legal history. She earned her PhD in the history of science from Harvard University in 2009. 

Before coming to Northeastern, Professor Swanson was the Berger-Howe Visiting Fellow in Legal History at Harvard Law School and associate professor at Earle Mack School of Law, Drexel University. Professor Swanson is currently working on a book, Banking on the Body, a history of body banking in the United States, drawing upon her doctoral dissertation, Body Banks: A History of Milk Banks, Blood Banks and Sperm Banks in the United States. 

Trained as a biochemist and molecular biologist at Yale University and the University of California at Berkeley, Professor Swanson was a published research scientist before entering law school, also at Berkeley. As an associate at Dechert LLP, she maintained an intellectual property law practice, where she was involved in drafting and negotiating technology licenses, advising biotech and computer services and software start-ups on protection of their inventions and drafting and prosecuting patents as a registered patent attorney. She clerked for Judge Cecil F. Poole, 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals and Judge William H. Orrick Jr., US District Court for the Northern District of California.