Swartz’s research focuses on elucidating and exploiting the roles of lymphatic function as it relates to cancer and chronic inflammatory diseases including asthma, using a variety of interdisciplinary approaches from bioengineering, immunobiology, physiology, cell biology and biomechanics. Her lab works in both basic hypothesis-driven research as well as in translational applications.

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A major interest has been to understand the immunological implications of lymphangiogenesis in tumors and other chronic inflammatory conditions, including allergic airway disease. Other current projects include elucidating new immunological functions of lymphatic endothelium and developing novel strategies for targeting the lymphatics and sentinel lymph nodes for immunotherapy. Building novel, physiologically relevant, 3D model systems for recapitulating key features of interest in tumor and lymphatic microenvironments has been an integral part of this research program, and they use those models in complementary ways with mouse models to gain new insight into tumor cell invasion and metastasis.