Programme
A professional training programme tailored to the needs of today’s students
The MBA in forensics is a unique training programme, given by internationally renowned experts and academics, during which you will better your skills, reinforce your leadership abilities, and develop a global vision in regards to the detection, collection and analysis of traces, to intelligence, and to both team and project management. The entirety of the curriculum is built to facilitate and optimise exchanges between private and public actors, from both the service and industry sectors, united in pursuit of the same goal: working in synergy and developing a network of highly proficient forensics professionals in order to better grasp the new opportunities brought by this rising scientific discipline.
In order to better reconcile this training with both your professional and personal schedule, while not compromising on the quality of the teachings that will be delivered, the provisional schedule accounts for 400 hours of training, grouped into 18 weeks, spread over two school years.
The curriculum
400 hours of training
72 days of training
18 four-day weeks
Module 1
Forensic science
Programme
Forensics is the science of traces of security or judicial interest. It offers a logical and rational understanding of the reconstruction of causes in a scientific approach.
There are multiple angles to approaching traces, as they can be digital or material, latent or provoked during an investigation or while gathering intelligence. This requires managers to be wise to both the capacity and limitations of forensics. This multifaceted approach echoes the Sydney declaration, which pleads for the recognition of forensics as a scientific discipline in its own right.
Objective
You will internalise the forensic reasoning method and be able to distinguish between the fields of application of law, ethics, criminology, and forensics.
Aware of the most prevalent cognitive bias when it comes to trace analysis (i.e. survivorship bias), you will be able to explain to your superiors and collaborators the interest of a forensic approach, be it for a public or private organisation, for a service provider or for industry.
Video presentation
Module 2
Management of forensic operations
Objective
You will master the strategic, operational and crisis management of a forensic process: detecting, collecting, analysing and exploiting a trace.
The main goal of this module is threefold:
• to attain an understanding of the strategic and operational capacities of forensic science when it comes to elaborating a security and judicial policy or strategy, in order to manage and drive an organisation;
• to know how to lead and manage a team of experts and/or scientists;
• to develop your emotional intelligence.
Programme
A forensic process requires numerous highly skilled professional who endeavour to identify, collect, exploit or evaluate traces of all nature in order to understand past events.
Managing such experts is a specific mission happening in a singular environment, and as such it requires multiple managerial skills: handling individual skills, and the ability to manage a team and drive it through a project and to an objective.
Module 3
Digital forensic
Programme
The evolution of digital technology and services, as well as the continuous adaptation of criminal organisations’ modus operandi make a continuous adaptation of our capacity to analyse traces necessary.
There are numerous challenges inherent to the search for digital evidence: data volume, encryption and dissimulation of traces, the growing use of crypto assets, as well as international rules, regulation and cooperation.
Objective
VYou will be able to identify the legal framework in which you operate, in order to ensure the continuity of your organisation’s investigative and analytic capacities (OSINT, on-site and remote searches, etc.). You will also be able to identify political and ethical issues as well as technological trends, and to organise and render operational services dedicated to the analysis of digital traces.
You will know the singular entanglements of cyber-oriented public-private or international partnerships and, in them, how to develop the synergies necessary to achieve the objectives you are given.
Module 4
Work environment
Objective
You will know how to turn external constraints and pressure into a work environment that favours day to day work and innovation.
Inside your organisation, you will guarantee the operational condition of forensic activity by ensuring the continued respect of legal and quality standards. You will also be in charge of managing the necessary technical and industrial resources, and will contribute to your organisation’s communication policy with due regard to the confidential aspects of its activities.
Programme
A forensic service does not exist in isolation. It is necessarily an answer to a need or a request from a partner: magistrate, investigator, insurer, political or operational decision-maker.
Those partners will only express their needs in terms of the results they expect, thus it is incumbent on the chief of the forensic service to have at their disposal the organisational, human and material capacities to achieve those results, all the while taking into account the different legal, regulatory, ethic, financial and scientific constraints they have to work with.
Module 5
Forensic practise
Programme
This module can be divided in two parts:
1) putting in perspective the present organisation of the scientific and technical police in France while raising awareness around the conception and management of forensic analysis structures and around the aspects relative to crisis management (study of a sensitive case, or one that attracts media attention);
2) forensic intelligence, which is the result of the logical computing of forensic data (traces), precise, timely and useful for investigation or intelligence purposes.
Objective
You will acquire an understanding of the French forensic ecosystem and will be able to identify the means dedicated to identifying victims of disasters and on crime scenes.
You will have acquired a working knowledge of traces of different natures: human, open source, provoked, latent, etc. Finally, you will be able to exploit a trace in several ways in order to produce forensic intelligence (FORINT).
Module 6
Visits and practise
Objective
You will put your knowledge to the test through operational experience of the exploitation of traces and intelligence in order to reinforce the resilience of your organisation when faced with complex situations.
By co-writing a dossier to be defended in front of a mock trial jury, you will experience contradiction and defending a piece of scientific evidence.
Through the different visits that will be organised, you will enrich you vision of management, thanks to meetings with experts and high-level managers, either from foreign countries or practising emerging disciplines.
Programme
Visits of specialised services, be they of forensics or of other specialities, will bring to light the singular aspects of forensic practise and of managing a team of experts.
The exercises and scenarios will allow you to experiment the following in simulation: the observation and collecting of traces (from trace to clue), their analysis in a laboratory and in a controlled setting, the exploitation of a result by analysis and comparison, and the writing of a dossier.
Video presentation
Download the programme
Dissertation topics
Every year, the teachers of the MBA in forensics offer dissertation topics dealing with issues important to the service and industry sector. Students or their firm may also offer topics pertaining with their activity, work environment, or a specific issue, subject to validation by the Scientific Committee of the MBA.
What are indicators of forensic activity?
Like all other activities inside a firm, forensic activity can be measured in order to report to the decision-makers on the work that is being performed. What indicators, then, would be most pertinent? Would they pertain to quality, production, the complexity of the cases that are being and have been treated, or something else?
Exploiting leaks
Data leaks are multiplying. Beyond the security concern they pose, their exploitation raises legal and ethic questions, but also others, related to building and maintaining partnerships, capacity building, and managing human resources.
Opportunities
Rechercher les causes d’un dommage majeur à des infrastructures suite à un sinistre ou évaluer les conséquences d’une atteinte au patrimoine immatériel par un salarié indélicat impose aujourd’hui de recourir à des méthodes et des moyens que seule la science forensique est capable de fournir et mettre en oeuvre.
Bruno C.Directeur sûreté
How did I get to be such a good DNA person? I went to school for four years and got a biology degree. And I went for two years and got a master’s degree. To be a good leader, I am probably going to have to invest that much or similar amount of time in my leadership. I decided to get a master’s in business. I changed course in the meetings that I attended. I stopped going to general meetings and started to go to leadership conferences.
Brian H.Lab Director
Le travail quotidien de l’expert en criminalistique est fondé sur l’étude de la trace, ce vestige incomplet d’une action passée. Face à des données partielles et à un cas qui est toujours singulier, la science forensique offre une capacité de pondération et d’évaluation des différentes hypothèses. Chaque résultat d’expertise ainsi remis en perspective constitue une aide importante pour la prise de décision.
François H.Directeur de laboratoire
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