Supported by nearly 40 years of practiced excellence in neuropsychiatry and academia, Dr. Mary Eva Swigar currently holds the title of professor emerita at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. Attaining emerita status in 2013, she previously served the university as an associate professor of psychiatry and neuropsychiatry beginning in 1988. She commenced her academic career at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, where she was an associate professor of psychiatry between 1977 and 1988.
Alongside her educational endeavors, Dr. Swigar served on the institutional review board of the Robert Wood Johnson Medical School in New Brunswick, New Jersey, from 1988 until her retirement in 2013. During this time, she sat on several groups and committees, including the credentials committee and geriatrics providers group. Likewise, she was chair of the institutional review board from 1993 to 2010, an ex-officio of the conductor research committee from 1993 to 2010 and chair of the executive committee from 2004 to 2010.
At the inception of her professional career, Dr. Swigar earned a Bachelor of Science from Muhlenberg College in 1962 and went on to medical school at Temple University, where she received an MD in 1966. Initially, she intended to pursue neurosurgery, but soon after discovered her passion for the brain. Consumed with the curiosity of how the brain functioned, noting it as “the final frontier,” she assimilated herself into the field of neuropsychiatry.
Among the notable highlights of her career, Dr. Swigar is grateful that psychiatry afforded her a broad range of opportunities, which included the research ethics and broad diagnostic facet of the brain-body function. She considers her research into medical ethics to be a crowning achievement, as well as receiving the Lifetime Achievement Award from Muhlenberg College later in her career.
Although retired from academia, Dr. Swigar remains in touch with universities and attends conferences. She enjoys maintaining a relationship with the Medical History Society of New Jersey and her faculty association, and says that her relationships with her colleagues are still very much alive.
Born in Nesquehoning, Pennsylvania, on October 17, 1940, Dr. Swigar currently resides in Basking Ridge, New Jersey. In her spare time, she enjoys mushroom hunting, listening to music and hiking.
