Julie Swann helps put people, programs in place
Julie Swann helps train humanitarians. That is just part of her job as co-director of Georgia Tech’s Center for Humanitarian Logistics, founded in 2007, and as an associate professor in the School of Industrial and Systems Engineering. Swann, ISyE 96, also is on loan through April at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as a senior science adviser working on pandemic vaccine distribution.
And she and her co-directors, Ozlem Ergun and Pinar Keskinocak, are organizing and hosting the second Health and Humanitarian Logistics Conference, which will bring nearly 200 students, faculty, government officials, military personnel and representatives from nongovernmental organizations and private industry worldwide to the Georgia Tech Research Institute on March 4-5 not only to address disaster response but also long-term issues like water and health (scl.gatech.edu/humlog2010).
Planning is a major part of humanitarian logistics.
“We work with a lot of organizations toward improving their efforts overall and thinking about some of these issues around forecasting — inventory, transportation, resource allocation. A lot of large organizations pre-position inventory worldwide so that they can respond very quickly in a specific area when there’s a particular crisis,” Swann said.
She fielded a lot of questions — from the media and the public — after the devastating January earthquake in Haiti.
“Everybody wants to do what they can to help,” she said. “People say, ‘Tell me where to go, tell me what to send.’ The best thing one can do is to give money and enable the large organizations to deliver the aid because we don’t want to clog up that very limited system with things that are not needed or people who are not able to do the work that is needed.”
Swann said the bottleneck of supplies at the Port-au-Prince airport was similar to what took place following the December 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami.
“In order to get food or other kind of aid in to the people who need it, there’s a whole system of things that has to happen. If there’s a hole or collapse in one of those pieces, then you can’t get things to where they need to be. That certainly happened at the airport. You had limited space for equipment, for unloading and getting things out the door. Everything was stopped at that point,” she said.
“We’re always looking at crises to see what we could have done better and what can be learned. Certainly that was true after [Hurricane Katrina in 2005]. There were failures at many levels. There were also issues around coordination — coordination among government organizations, private industry, NGOs,” Swann said.
“It’s always difficult to get people and organizations to focus on things before they occur. Maybe the event doesn’t occur and they feel like they’ve wasted resources,” she said. “Not only is it difficult to get them to focus on things before they happen, it’s also difficult to get people and organizations to make investments in infrastructure and capacity building. It’s something that NGOs struggle with all the time. How can we get money to build up the supply chain system or network or technology so that we can have more effective aid when it comes time?
“Everybody wants their money to go toward providing food and water and medicine, which is good, but if improvements can be made in the infrastructure, then ultimately it improves the effort. But it’s hard to motivate people for that.”
The Center for Humanitarian Logistics is trying to provide that motivation.
“Our interest in work in this area predated the tsunami and Katrina. Those are events that people often think about. I think we’ll ultimately put Haiti in that category as well in terms of visibility and how it’s touched people and made them really focused on this area,” Swann said.
She was interested in health policy before heading to Northwestern University for her graduate and doctoral degrees with a plan to return to Tech as a faculty member. “Even as an undergraduate at Georgia Tech I was looking and thinking about areas where policy and science and technology intersect.
“One of the advantages at Georgia Tech is that we have scale that very few other institutions have in the science, engineering and technology sectors. There are a number of universities that have one or two people working on something, and there are some that have centers on earthquakes. But in terms of the intersection of logistics with health or humanitarian areas, there are very few places that have what we have,” Swann said.
“One of my passions is using what we know from science and technology and, in my case, mathematics, because that’s what underlies a lot of industrial engineering, for positive social impact,” she said. “One of the things I’m really looking at right now is what should a public health supply chain look like if you want to meet a particular goal? What happens in health and humanitarian areas is often you don’t have a centralized body that controls all of the decisions. How can we design the system so that it ultimately achieves what you want it to achieve?”
Swann said a colleague in the center and her students have developed an Excel-based tool for doctors and parents to keep track of what vaccinations a child has had and when and what he needs next.
“It’s now been downloaded over 40,000 times. That’s one that’s had a very clear impact that’s tangible,” she said. “It’s really a complicated system. It takes a good bit of math running in the background to be able to solve that problem.
“In fact, many kinds of systems can be represented in a mathematical way. I’ve done some work with HIV that is related to my interest in mathematics and modeling to improve policy decisions. I’ve done some work with Hepatitis C, and we’re looking preliminarily at measles as well,” Swann said.
The work is never-ending.
She referenced a list that a Nobel laureate, the late Richard Smalley, compiled in 2003 of the top 10 problems facing humanity over the next 50 years: energy, water, food, environment, poverty, terrorism and war, disease, education, democracy and population.
“In the foreseeable future it’s unlikely the problems will be completely solved. That said, I think there have been inroads in the decades past that we’ve made. Just take one small example: Antibiotics have reduced infections in many places, and that was a real game changer,” Swann said.
“I think that although the task is daunting and challenging, we can chip away at it. Sometimes we make small chips and sometimes we make bigger cracks in it, but we can make improvements.”
Twitter
Pingback: Health and Humanitarian Logistics