During World War II he served as an Army officer, designing antennas and receiving systems for signal intelligence. After graduate school he served in faculty positions in Washington University (St. Louis), University of Alaska and Michigan State University before joining Illinois in 1956. He served periods of service as Head of the Departments of Astronomy and of Electrical and Computer Engineering and as Director of the Vermilion River Observatory, for which he designed and built two very large, innovative radio telescopes.
From 1964 to 1968 he served as leader of the conceptual design group for the Very Large Array (VLA) radio telescope of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory. His extensive professional writing has included work on radio astronomy, the ionosphere, and physical acoustics.
Since retiring from Illinois in 1988 he has continued to supervise graduate students and to provide consulting service in acoustics and antenna technology to the U. S. Army Construction Engineering Research Laboratory.
Swenson is a Fellow of the IEEE and the AAAS, a Member of the National Academy of Engineering, and a Guggenheim Fellow.
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