Wendy Sue Swanson

WORK HISTORY

EDUCATION

SKILLS

ABOUT WENDY SUE SWANSON

Dr. Swanson has over 20+ years of experience as a pediatrician, executive, digital health expert, and bioethicist. She is an experienced executive and national public health spokesperson. She has worked as an executive in the hospital, practiced primary care community pediatrics for 12 years, advised and held executive roles in start-ups, been a contributor and journalist in print and TV media, and has been a spokesperson on behalf of numerous Dept. of Health and US national academies. She was the Chief Medical Officer for Before Brands, a food allergy prevention company from launch until it was acquired by Nestle Health Science in 2023. Dr. Swanson is focused on disrupting health communication to increase community understanding via democratizing health advice, health information, and transforming the practice of medicine.As a pediatrician, author, and a prominent advocate of evidence-based medicine and prevention, Dr. Swanson speaks internationally on communication technology, digital health, and health innovation. She is a leading voice in health care, working to revolutionize health communications by using social and digital media, as well as mass media, to bridge the gap between parents and doctors. In 2009, Dr. Swanson launched and authored the first doctor blog for a US hospital, Seattle Mama Doc, for Seattle Children’s Hospital that published over 800 posts in 10 years. She founded the Digital Health department in 2013 and was later named Chief of Digital Innovation. For six years she led a team in innovation inside the hospital testing and creating new digital tools and partnerships. She is a pioneer in using social media in medicine with a focus on increasing trust for prevention. For more than a decade, she generated worldwide interest in pediatric public health topics, her team\'s digital health innovation projects, and prevention solutions by leveraging her blog, social channels, and media opportunities. Her blog had over 12M unique visitors and she averaged over 800 earned local and national media placements annually as an expert on TV, audio, and print interviews. She was a weekly television health reporter on KING5 News, the NBC Seattle affiliate, in addition to weekly contributions on Twitter, her blog, her podcast, and numerous social channels.She has been camping in the wilderness since toddlerhood, a distance runner since middle school, and is always trying to get outside. Prior to her career in medicine, Dr Swanson was a middle school science and math teacher in the Oakland Unified Public Schools through Teach for America