French elected to SECoPA governing board
Eddie French
The interim head of Mississippi State’s Department of Political Science and Public Administration is a newly elected member of the Southeastern Conference for Public Administration’s governing board.
Eddie French is a specialist in human resource management and the politics of state and local governments. A 2001 MSU doctoral graduate, he returned to his alma mater in 2008.
The regional conference is an affiliate of the American Society for Public Administration. Established in 1978, it includes practitioners and academics in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North and South Carolina, and Tennessee. For more, visit www.secopa.org.
French has been an active SECoPA member for two decades. As a doctoral student, he won its Morris W.H. Collins Award for best research paper. The award also is a memorial to the founding director of MSU’s John C. Stennis Institute of Government and Economic Development.
Before being named interim MSU department head, French led the Stennis Institute after the retirement of longtime executive director W. Martin “Marty” Wiseman.
“The conference means a lot to me since I won the Collins Award,” he said. In addition to regularly attending the annual gatherings, his students consistently have been encouraged to attend and compete, he added.
Prior to joining MSU’s College of Arts and Sciences faculty eight years ago, French was with the University of Memphis’ Division of Public and Nonprofit Administration. He also taught at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville and Appalachian State University in North Carolina.
French holds a bachelor’s degree in political science from UT-K, as well as masters’ from East Tennessee State University and the University of Virginia in, respectively, city management and higher education administration. For more biographical information, see www.pspa.msstate.edu/about/faculty/staff.php?id=pef1.
MSU is Mississippi’s leading university, available online at www.msstate.edu.
Karyn Brown | College of Arts and Sciences
