As faculty in the Keck School of Medicine, Department of Family Medicine and a nationally recognized leader in health promotion, Paula Swinford, MS, MHA brings a background of work at the intersection of public health and higher education to her work in health promotion as a process to wellbeing in a campus setting.

She is recognized as a foundational and transformative leader. She champions the use of a settings approach, a collective impact framework, population-level data and service standards. As board member of the Council for the Advancement of Standards in Higher Education (CAS), an advisor to Healthier Princeton, and an Executive Editor of the Journal of American College Health she started in national conversations about what creates health for people, places, and the planet. At international meetings, including the 2015 International Conference on Health Promoting Universities and Colleges in Kelowna, British Columbia, and the 2021 World Health Organization’s 10th Global Conference on Health Promotion, she connects The States with innovation from colleagues around the world.

At the University of Southern California, Ms. Swinford’s dynamic and innovative work testifies to her vision for a vibrant health-enhancing student residential experience. Her achievements include establishing nationally recognized campus-wide initiatives, including the USC Well-being Collective that strives to use a settings approach that systemically improves the build environment and campus culture. Her foresight to collect over twenty years of salutogenic population-level data allows the Collective to better establish priorities for health promotion strategies.

Her responsibilities include leading a robust Office for Health Promotion Strategy that serves as the backbone for the USC Wellbeing Collective, a collective impact effort with the common agenda of strengthening a campus culture driven by wellbeing. Ms. Swinford currently oversees a staff who focus on research, communication, capacity building and community engagement.

Paula Swinford, with her contrarian curiosity and occasionally annoying disruptor tendencies, plays a vital role for her colleagues and the students she serves in persistently transformed the campus experience in distinct ways that contribute to the professional and academic environs.