Kenneth Ronald "Ken" French (born March 10, 1954) is the Roth Family Distinguished Professor of Finance at the Tuck School of Business, Dartmouth College. He has previously been a faculty member at MIT, the Yale School of Management, and the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. He is most famous for his work on asset pricing with Eugene Fama. They wrote a series of papers that cast doubt on the validity of the Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM), which posits that a stock's beta alone should explain its average return. These papers describe two factors above and beyond a stock's market beta which can explain differences in stock returns: market capitalization and "value". They also offer evidence that a variety of patterns in average returns, often labeled as "anomalies" in past work, can be explained with their Fama–French three-factor model. Education He obtained a B.S. in 1975, from Lehigh University in mechanical engineering. He then earned an M.B.A. in 1978, an M.S. in 1981, and a Ph.D. in finance in 1983, all from the University of Rochester. In 2005, French became a Rochester Distinguished Scholar. Career Along with contributing articles to major journals such as the Journal of Finance, the Journal of Financial Economics, the Review of Financial Studies, the American Economic Review, the Journal of Political Economy, and the Journal of Business, French is also a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, an advisory editor at the Journal of Financial Economics, and a former associate editor of the Journal of Finance and the Review of Financial Studies. Professor French was the vice president of the American Finance Association in 2005 and was the organization's president in 2007-8. Also in 2007, Professor French was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (AAAS). French is a board member of Dimensional Fund Advisors in Austin, Texas, where he also works as Consultant and Head of Investment Policy. References External links Home page at Dartmouth College Biography at Dimensional Fund Advisors Highly Cited Researchers 2005 Thompson Scientific Shortlisting 1954 births Living people Financial economists 21st-century American economists Lehigh University alumni MIT Sloan School of Management faculty Tuck School of Business faculty University of Chicago faculty University of Rochester alumni Yale School of Management faculty Fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences Presidents of the American Finance Association