Dr. Camille François is the founder and president of ROOST — a technology nonprofit building a commons of open source safety tools — and an Assistant Professor of Professional Practice at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs, where she co-leads the Institute of Global Politics' Technology & Democracy Initiative with Nobel Peace Prize laureate Maria Ressa.
Camille served as a technology executive across multiple domains including social media, cybersecurity, and gaming. She was Senior Director for Trust & Safety at Niantic, Chief Innovation Officer at Graphika, and Principal Researcher at Google. She specializes in building and leading high-performing teams to detect and mitigate online harms at scale, from child safety to violent extremism. Her original scholarship on these issues has helped shape digital safety practices across leading Silicon Valley platforms.
Her public interest work includes investigating information operations on behalf of the U.S. Senate Select Intelligence Committee, directing France's governmental inquiry into the opportunities and risks of immersive technologies, and co-chairing, at President Emmanuel Macron's appointment, France's national consultative assembly on the future of the information society. Her current research focuses on public interest AI and new open source practices.
Recognized by TIME's "100 Next," MIT Technology Review's "35 Under 35," and the World Economic Forum as a Young Global Leader, she is also a Fulbright scholar and a Young Leader of the French-American Foundation. She holds a Ph.D. in geopolitics from the French Institute of Geopolitics at Paris 8 University, and master's degrees from Columbia University and Sciences Po. Her work has been featured internationally in media including The New York Times, The Washington Post, WIRED, and Le Monde.
She lives and works in New York City.
