Roland Bouffanais

Roland Bouffanais is Associate Professor at the University of Geneva (Faculty of Science and Global Studies Institute), where he holds a Chair in Computational Diplomacy. He is Director of the Computer Science Department (since 2025) and Co-Director of the Science in Diplomacy Lab (SiDLab), a joint initiative of the University of Geneva and ETH Zürich (since 2024). He is also Adjunct Professor at the University of Ottawa (ON, Canada) and a Research Affiliate of the School of Engineering at MIT (Cambridge, MA).

He was educated at the École Normale Supérieure de Lyon and holds an Agrégation in Physical Sciences. He earned his Ph.D. in Computational Science from EPFL, for which he received the IBM Research Prize in Computational Sciences (2008) and the ERCOFTAC Da Vinci Award Silver Medal (2007). After a postdoctoral fellowship with Prof. Dick K. P. Yue at MIT, he was on the faculty of the Singapore University of Technology and Design (2011–2020), where he was Associate Professor with tenure and Director of Graduate Studies, and of the University of Ottawa (2020–2023).

His research applies complexity science to collective behavior in natural, artificial and social systems, with current work in computational diplomacy and global governance, multi-agent systems and swarm intelligence, social contagion and collective decision-making, computational social science and network science. He has published some 160 peer-reviewed journal articles, conference papers, book chapters and policy reports, and is the author of Design and Control of Swarm Dynamics (Springer, 2016). He also writes opinion pieces for newspapers in Europe, Asia and North America. He is Academic Editor of PLOS ONE, Associate Editor of Royal Society Open Science and of Frontiers in Robotics and AI, and served on the Editorial Board of Scientific Reports (2020–2025). He is a Fellow of the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) of the University of Amsterdam (2026–2027).