Roger is the Kyocera Professor of Ceramics in the Case School of Engineering, Case Western Reserve University (CWRU) in Cleveland, Ohio. He has secondary appointments in Macromolecular Science, Biomedical Engineering, and Physics. He is the faculty director of the CWRU Applied Data Science program that offers a minor university-wide. He is the director of the SDLE Research Center at CWRU, an Ohio Third Frontier, Wright Project Center focused on lifetime and degradation science (L&DS) of long-lived technologies, data science, and analytics.

L&DS looks at long-lived environmentally exposed materials, components, and systems such as photovoltaic technologies and energy-efficient lighting, roofing, building exteriors, and more. The center uses data science and analytics on a broad range of energy and materials projects, including a DOE-ARPA-E funded building energy efficiency project and a DOE-NETL funded Rapid Alloy Qualification project.

He is a participant in the Performance and Reliability of Photovoltaic Systems task of the International Energy Agency, Photovoltaic Power Systems Programme. He is a member of ANSI/IEC “Solar Photovoltaic Energy Systems” US-Technical Advisory Group; the Standards Technical Panel (STP) of UL, “Flat-Plate Photovoltaic Modules and Panels”; Intl. PV Module QA Task Force; and ASTM Committees on Weathering and Durability: Service Life Prediction and Photovoltaic Electric Power Conversion. He was a recent member of the U. S. Department of Energy, Basic Energy Science Advisory Committee.

Prior to joining CWRU in 2010, French was a Research Fellow in Central Research and Development at the DuPont Company (starting in 1985) and Adjunct Professor of Materials Science at the University of Pennsylvania (from 1994). He received his B.S. from Cornell and his Ph.D. from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, both in Materials Science.

He has published 126 journal articles, 85 proceedings papers, 5 book chapters and given 139 invited talks and 230 conference presentations. He has 28 issued U.S. patents and 4 active filings.