François Bar is Assistant Professor of Communication. He comes to Stanford from the University of California at San Diego, where he was on the Communication Department's faculty. He received his Ph.D. in city and regional planning from the University of California at Berkeley (1990). His dissertation "Configuring the Telecommunications Infrastructure for the Computer Age: the Economics of Network Control" won the 1989-90 Doctoral Award from the International Center for Information Technologies. He has studied at Harvard's J.F. Kennedy School of Government and he holds a Diplome d'Ingenieur from the Ecole Nationale des Ponts et Chausees (ENPC), Paris, France.
His current research interests include comparative telecommunication policy, as well as economic, strategic and social dimensions of computer networking, new media and the internet. His research has been published in books of collected studies, in policy reports, and in such journals as Telecommunication Policy, Communications & Strategies, Reseaux, and the International Journal of Technology Management. Since 1983, he has been a member of the Berkeley Roundtable on the International Economy (BRIE), at UC Berkeley, where he served as program director for research on telecommunications policy and information networking.