Lawrence Swiader
Lawrence Swiader has spent his career studying the intersection of technology, media, and education in service of how it improves people's lives. Currently, as Chief Digital Officer at the American Battlefield Trust he oversees all aspects of Trust's programs and digital presence in support of protecting battlefields and informing the public about the vital role these battlefields played in determining the course of our nation's history.
He oversees more than 20 apps, websites, AR and VR, digital marketing, and social media. Lawrence conceived of and manages a traveling exhibition called “American Revolution Experience,” which has been touring the U.S for more than two years and has received an overwhelming number of requests from libraries, museums, and historic sites to host.
Formerly, Lawrence was the creator of the Bedsider.org program which made use of digital and traditional media to improve the reproductive health behaviors of young adults in the U.S. Applying behavior change theory, along with emerging technology tools, he helped address the high rates of unplanned pregnancy in the U.S. with Bedsider. Qualitative user research showed that the effort paid off. Bedsider was shown to work; people in the intervention group had significantly fewer instances of unprotected sex and unplanned pregnancies than those in the control group. The research Lawrence led was published in the journal Social Marketing Quarterly in 2015.
At the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, Lawrence used technology as a tool to teach about the history of the Holocaust and to motivate people to act to end contemporary genocide. He reached new audiences through products like A Good Man in Hell—a movie about the Rwandan genocide—distributed to classrooms around the world, and a partnership with Google in a then-unprecedented online mapping initiative aimed at furthering awareness and action to the genocide in the Darfur region of Sudan. Lawrence worked with the Park Service to project images from the Darfur genocide on the walls of the Museum—an unprecedented program at the time. Other programs of note includedRipples of Genocide, about the after-effects of the Rwandan genocide in Congo which included experiences from John Prendergast, then Special Adviser to the President of the International Crisis Group, and actress Angelina Jolie, who was then the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) Goodwill Ambassador. His team was also responsible for an innovative website and a space in the Museum called “The Learning Center,” which became the place for innovative presentations of historical information.
In his second home of Athens, Greece, Lawrence has worked on various digital art projects and consulted with Greek history museums. Lawrence graduated from the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University with a degree in Television, Radio, and Film and earned a master’s degree in Instructional Design, Development and Evaluation from Syracuse University’s School of Education. He has a Greek wife, college-aged daughter, and finds inspiration from playing tennis, travel, sea kayaking in Greece, art, and a good book.