Dr. French Caldwell, DLP, is the founder and chief research officer of FrenchCaldwell, LLC, as well as CFO of ThanSyn.com – a syndicate of leading industry analysts. Having recently completed his doctorate in law and policy at Northeastern University, French was awarded the Dean’s Medal for Outstanding Doctoral Research for his dissertation Tweeting dystopia: the impact of cybermediaries on the making of public policy.
Dr. David Wesley, PhD, Research Program Manager at the Northeastern University School of International Strategy and Business, described the importance and value of French’s work, “French developed a methodology to focus on the real issues [in social media] and correlate them to the actual referendum outcome in a way that was more accurate than polling data, while allowing policymakers to potentially exclude the role of bots and trolls….[His research] raises awareness of the challenges faced by policymakers and social media companies in tackling issues such as fake news and social amplification through automated posts (bots.)”
Until late 2018, French was the Chief Evangelist and global head of marketing for MetricStream, a governance, risk and compliance (GRC) technology firm in Silicon Valley. Before joining MetricStream in 2014, French was a Vice President and Gartner Fellow at Gartner, Inc., where he advised executive clients and completed fellows research on disruptive trends and technology. He led the ground-breaking White House-sponsored cyberterrorism war game, Digital Pearl Harbor, and has appeared on international news programs, including a documentary on the History Channel. In a 15-year career at Gartner he established and led research and advisory programs on knowledge management, digital society, government, public policy, cybersecurity, risk management and compliance, and legal information technology.
Prior to joining Gartner in 1999, French was the director of knowledge services in Arthur Andersen’s Office of Government Services, where he worked with strategic clients, including the Central Intelligence Agency, the Internal Revenue Service, and the Department of Defense. French completed a career as a nuclear submarine officer, and he has directed special congressional projects for the Secretary of the Navy and the Secretary of Defense. Upon retiring from the Navy he served as the international liaison and special projects officer for the congressional Commission on Roles and Missions of the armed services.
French earned his Bachelor of Science degree in oceanography at the U.S. Naval Academy a Master of Arts in international studies at Old Dominion University, and a Doctor of Law and Policy at Northeastern University. He earned his command and staff degree at the U.S. Naval War College. He has been a Federal Executive Fellow at the Brookings Institution, an adjunct Fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and an adjunct professor and board member of the Institute for Innovation and Knowledge Management in the graduate engineering management program at George Washington University. He is the author of Arctic Leverage: Canadian Sovereignty and Security, and has contributed to over 400 research papers and articles.
