About Meridian Influence Group
Strategic Advisory | Solution Architecture | Threat Intelligence
Meridian Influence Group is a strategic advisory firm operating at the nexus of behavioral science, AI, and national security.
Founded by Dr. Todd C. Helmus — a behavioral scientist, 20-year RAND Corporation veteran — the firm equips defense contractors, allied governments, corporate enterprises, and civic institutions to anticipate, detect, and counter complex information campaigns.
Dr. Todd C. Helmus
Todd Helmus has spent over 20 years at the RAND Corporation leading programs at the intersection of AI, influence operations, and national security. He is the lead author of Enlisting Madison Avenue: The Marketing Approach to Earning Popular Support in Theaters of Operation — the landmark RAND report that made the Washington Post front page, introduced private-sector branding and audience segmentation to military strategic communications, and became a foundational reference for military information operations professionals worldwide.
Todd authored 'Artificial Intelligence, Deepfakes, and Disinformation: A Primer' — a foundational resource with over 33,000 downloads and 180+ academic citations. He led multi-year research programs on election interference across the 2018, 2020, and 2024 cycles, built ML-based detection systems for coordinated inauthentic behavior and adversary propaganda, and created the RAND Program Evaluation Toolkit for Countering Violent Extremism, which DHS mandated for all terrorism prevention grant recipients.
He has led programs spanning 25+ countries, served as a counter-terrorism advisor to Multi-National Forces - Iraq and directed a 45-person analytical team embedded with U.S. Special Operations in Afghanistan
His research on Russian influence operations was impactful enough to result in personal sanctions by the Russian Federation in 2022 — a direct measure of adversarial impact. He testified before the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence on countering foreign influence and advised Congress on regulatory frameworks for generative AI.
Todd holds a Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology from Wayne State University, with expertise in persuasion, behavioral influence, and decision-making — the human behavioral foundations of why information campaigns succeed or fail. He is adjunct faculty at Johns Hopkins University, Syracuse University, and American University.
Credentials:
Personally sanctioned by Russian Federation (2022)
U.S. Senate testimony on foreign influence (2018)
Currently advising OSD on AI adoption
Ph.D., Clinical Psychology (persuasion & influence)
Author of Enlisting Madison Avenue
Impact:
500,000+ publication downloads
3,000+ academic citations
$12M+ procured across DoD, DHS, State, Army
50+ cross-functional teams, 25+ countries
Expert in NYT, Financial Times, MSNBC
How I got here
My career began in a clinical psychology program in Detroit, studying behavioral pharmacology and addiction medicine: why people make the choices they make, and what actually changes those choices. I expected to spend my career in a research lab.
September 11th redirected that. Within two years I was working on the treatment of combat stress casualties, and soon after on how al-Qa'ida radicalized and recruited. That work led to advisory roles in Iraq and Afghanistan, to tracking ISIS networks online, and eventually to evaluating Russian information operations.
What carried across every one of those problems was the same question I faced in the clinic: what makes a person believe something, trust someone, or act?
That question is still the foundation of my work. Influence campaigns don't fail because the technology is weak. They fail because they misread the people they were meant to move. AI has made campaigns faster and cheaper to run. It hasn't changed that fact.