Dr. Christy Swann is an internationally-recognized, award-winning Earth and Planetary scientist with 20 years of experience studying windblown sand on the beaches of Earth, from Brazil to the Netherlands and even the windy, dusty environment of Mars. Throughout her scientific career, she has built innovative technology that pushes the forefront of our technological capabilities and scientific understanding of Aeolian Geomorphology.

 

Dr. Swann’s scientific accomplishments began during her Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees from East Carolina University where her research led her to develop the Wind Potential Index which created a method for scientists and planners to estimate the volume of windblown sand accreted during individual wind events. From her Master’s work, she was accepted into a Ph.D. program at Texas A&M University to study with Dr. Doug Sherman, the world’s preeminent coastal dune scientist. During her Ph.D., Dr. Swann started building her own instruments to solve unanswered scientific problems and designed the first instrument capable of discerning the minimum wind speed needed to mobilize windblown sand to enable the dune building process. Her internationally-recognized publications on her scientific breakthroughs were recognized by the NASA Curiosity team, who was looking through the lens of Curiosity on Mars and unable to understand why the current windblown sand models were not working. Dr. Swann’s recent breakthrough from her PhD work led to a NASA postdoctoral fellowship, where she adapted her earth instrumentation for Mars and ran a multitude of experiments at NASA Ames in a Mars low-pressure wind tunnel to solve the Curiosity conundrum. From that work, Dr. Swann unraveled a long-standing question on the fundamental physics of windblown sand and developed a model that predicts the minimum wind speed needed to mobilize sand on Mars, which is how the Red Planet’s dust storms begin. That research won her two prestigious national awards for research excellence: the G.K. Gilbert award and the Alan Berman award. 

 

Over the last 7 years, Dr. .Swann has conducted coastal science for naval operations in the Ocean Sciences Division of the Naval Research Laboratory. Her most recent experiment led a team of engineers to build the world’s first field-based particle tracking velocimetry system, producing the first ever 3D measurements of atmospheric turbulence on beaches. She has been invited to publish this research in Aeolian Research, the foremost scientific journal for aeolian geomorphological science.

 

Over her career, Dr. Swann has published over 26 scientific articles on coastal dunes on earth and Mars, advised many PhD and Masters students, been an Associate or Guest Editor for high impact scientific journals and served on multiple review panels for universities, NASA and the Navy. She has been invited to give keynote addresses and guest lectures at CalTech, Stanford, Astronomical Societies, and numerous conferences. She currently serves on a Mars lander team in collaboration with partners at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Stanford, Cornell, and other high profile private research institutes. However, she still makes time to mentor young students to promote STEM, women-in-science, entrepreneurship and empower the next generation of groundbreaking scientists, engineers and business owners. She is currently on the board for the international organization of Women in Coastal Geoscience and Engineering where she is a mentor for young women scientists and focuses on promoting Diversity, Equity and Inclusion in the workplace, university programs and beyond.

 

Last year, Dr. Swann left the Naval Research Laboratory to start her own company, RCOAST, a tech-based sustainability company that uses the latest science and tech to make eroding coastlines more resilient.