Austin D. Swafford, PhD, is a scientist whose expertise spans a wide range of fields critical to the advancement of science, technology and healthcare. He has led multiple private-public partnerships focused on automation, artificial intelligence, drug discovery, immunology, genetics, microbiology, and nanotechnology, as well as curriculum, business, and software development.

Dr. Swafford is a co-author on several patent applications and >50 publications with >17,000 combined citations on a wide range of subjects including basic and applied biology as well as novel diagnostics, data and sample processing methods and data analysis tools.

In 2023, Austin was selected as the next President of the International Biomedical Research Alliance, whose mission is to help alleviate human suffering and disease by supporting the training of promising students through the prestigious NIH-Oxford-Cambridge (OxCam) Scholars Program and its affiliates. This Program was created in 2001 to revolutionize the way in which the most talented biomedical PhD and MD/PhD students are trained and has since graduated over 200 of the world's aspiring biomedical leaders.

Dr. Swafford was formerly CTO at InterOme, Inc. where he and his team developed end-to-end solutions for turning the vision of precision medicine and precision public health into a reality in collaboration with an international group of advisors, laboratories, and logistics providers.

Dr. Swafford was formerly the Director of Research- Innovations for the Center for Microbiome Innovation in the Jacobs School of Engineering at UC San Diego where he and his team built numerous private-public partnerships examining the impact of microbes on the health of humans, animals, and the environment as well as developing state-of-the-art methods, technologies, software, and bioinformatics approaches to characterizing the microbiome.

He previously completed a postdoc in beta cell regeneration at Novartis and then spent several years in industry developing and implementing high-throughput workflows at leading pharmaceutical and biotech companies.

Dr. Swafford earned his doctoral degree in Medical Genetics from the NIH-OxCam Program supported by an NSF Graduate Fellowship in Bioengineering to study the etiology and early diagnosis of type 1 diabetes.

In 2022, Dr. Swafford founded the Swafford Consulting Group whose mission is to help businesses, organizations, and individuals navigate the biomedical research and innovation landscape and to bridge the gaps between conception and realization in science and technology.