Will French

Will French is an M.Phil. student at the RAND School of Public Policy and an assistant policy researcher at RAND. A Lieutenant in the Air Force, he has a research background in GIS and remote sensing. In the past he was on a team with the Army Engineer Research and Development Center (ERDC) to utilize machine learning to visualize, simulate, and predict foreign forest attributes. French also accomplished research with students and staff at the Air Force Academy on a project to analyze and predict DOD asset degradation. For his capstone project, he leveraged ArcGIS to quantify the spatial significance of political violence across road networks in western sub-Saharan Africa. In 2024, French interned at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) within the Office of Public and Governmental Affairs where he was charged with digitizing and organizing case files to be compliant with Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests.

French graduated with triple distinction from the United States Air Force Academy with a B.S. in geospatial science, a minor in space warfighting, and a GEOINT certificate with the United States Geospatial Intelligence Foundation (USGIF).