Professional Bio

Dan Folk is a PhD candidate in American Politics and International Relations. He completed his B.A. in International Politics in 2019 at Penn State and his M.A. in Public (Policy) Management in 2021 at Johns Hopkins University. His research interests involve national security, policy design and implementation, cognitive processing, and intelligence analysis. Dan is particularly interested in how street-level bureaucrats and other government employees employ critical thinking skills and methods to ensure cognitive accuracy when informing, implementing, and enforcing state through national level government policies.

Dan has over 20-years-experience working in the DoD, both in uniform and as a civilian. Most recently, Dan served for three years as an instructor and team lead teaching fundamentals of intelligence analysts for entry-level through senior analysts at the Joint Military Intelligence Training Center in Washington, D.C. Dan has also served in multiple analytic positions including as a senior briefer at the Pentagon and a senior analyst in Kabul, Afghanistan.