Shannon E. French, PhD

Shannon E. French is the Inamori Professor in Ethics, director of the Inamori International Center for Ethics and Excellence, and a tenured full professor in the Philosophy Department at Case Western Reserve University (CWRU) in Cleveland, Ohio with a secondary appointment in the School of Law. Professor French received her BA from Trinity University (San Antonio, Texas) in 1990 and her PhD in philosophy from Brown University (Providence, Rhode Island) in 1997. Prior to starting at CWRU in 2008, she taught for eleven years as a tenured associate professor of philosophy at the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, and served as associate chair of the Department of Leadership, Ethics, and Law. She founded the first master’s degree program in Military Ethics in the US at CWRU, works with the US and allied military, service academies, and chaplain corps around the world, and held the General Hugh Shelton Distinguished Visiting Chair in Ethics at the Command and General Staff College Foundation for seven years. Her core areas of research are military ethics – especially as it relates to conduct of war, ethical leadership, command climate, sacrifice and responsibility, warrior transitions, ethical responses to terrorism, and the future of warfare – and ethical issues in emerging technology, including artificial intelligence.  She is the author of many scholarly publications, editor-in-chief of the International Journal of Ethical Leadership, an associate editor for the Journal of Military Ethics, on several other editorial boards, and is active in the European Chapter of the International Society for Military Ethics (Euro-ISME). She is a Senior Research Fellow for the Simons Center for Ethical Leadership and Interagency Cooperation, an ELSI (Ethical, Legal, and Societal Impact) consultant for the Institute for Defense Analysis (IDA) and the RAND Corporation, and a member of the ethics board for ACM (Association for Computing Machinery). She serves as the ELSI lead or a primary researcher on major grant projects funded by DARPA, ONR, and other organizations.

View Professor French's CV