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).

Jointly advised with Prof. Didier Wernli (UNIGE). Member of the Science in Diplomacy Lab and co-author of the first SiDLab policy report, Building a Data-Driven and Complexity-Aware Digital Infrastructure for Effective Multilateralism (2026).

Research: data-driven approaches to multilateral negotiations and international governance.

Jointly advised with Prof. Livia Schubiger (ETH Zürich) and Prof. Didier Wernli (UNIGE), within the UNIGE–ETH partnership for the Science in Diplomacy Lab.

Research: quantitative political science applied to international negotiations and conflict.

Jointly advised with Prof. Didier Wernli (UNIGE).

Research: computational social choice and voting, and the simulation of democratic deliberation with multi-agent large language models; co-author of Simulating Democratic Deliberation (EMNLP 2026).

Started his doctorate at the University of Ottawa and is about to defend his thesis.

Research: social contagion and consensus formation on complex networks; lead author of Social Contagion Drives Collective Consensus Formation on Scale-Free Networks (Scientific Reports, 2026) and co-author of Adaptivity: A Path Towards General Swarm Intelligence? (Frontiers in Robotics and AI, 2023).

Co-supervised with Prof. Didier Wernli (UNIGE).

Research: higher-order (hypergraph) modeling of diplomatic interactions; lead author of the preprint Uncovering Higher-Order Interactions from Memory in Observed Dynamics (arXiv, 2026) and co-author of From Consensus to Multi-Polarity: A Network Analysis of the Structural Transformation in the European Parliament (preprint, 2026).

Main supervisor Prof. Didier Wernli (UNIGE); co-supervised by Prof. Bouffanais.

Research: natural language processing applied to international relations.

Co-supervised with Prof. Didier Wernli (UNIGE).

Research: DiploSim — pluralistic alignment in multi-agent LLMs.

Co-supervised with Prof. Didier Wernli (UNIGE).

Research: cooperation and competition in a swarm of LLMs.

Doctorate in cotutelle with Prof. Julien Randon-Furling (ENS Paris-Saclay).

Research: representation learning for complex systems.

Master's thesis carried out jointly with Prof. Dirk Helbing (ETH Zürich).

Research: network analysis of legislative voting — 7,191 roll-call votes across five European Parliament legislatures (EP6–EP10, 2004–2026), using community detection, modularity by policy area and multiplex coalition analysis; lead author of the preprint From Consensus to Multi-Polarity: A Network Analysis of the Structural Transformation in the European Parliament (2026).