In 2011, he received his Ph.D. in condensed matter physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Swingle was a Simons Fellow in Theoretical Physics at Harvard University from 2011 to 2014, a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University from 2014 to 2016 and a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University from 2016 to 2017. His research focuses on the physics of quantum information, especially in the context of quantum many-body systems and quantum gravity.