Roland Bouffanais is an Associate Professor at the Global Studies Institute and the Department of Computer Science (Faculty of Science) of the University of Geneva.  

His research on complex systems involves a synergistic combination of computational and theoretical developments with real-life experimental validations. Specifically, he focuses on interdisciplinary research at the intersection of complexity science, the social sciences, and AI. Over the past three years, Bouffanais investigated problems centered around social contagions, collective decision-making, and human dynamics.

Roland Bouffanais has published 110+ peer-reviewed papers in top-rated scientific journals (including Nature, Nature Communications, Science Advances) and selective conference proceedings. He has authored a monograph titled Design and Control of Swarm Dynamics, published by Springer in their Complexity Series in 2016. Bouffanais has also published numerous Opinion Pieces and Op-Eds in various newspapers in Asia, Europe, and North America. Bouffanais holds several Editorial Board appointments with leading interdisciplinary journals: Scientific Reports (Springer-Nature), PLoS one (Public Library of Science), Royal Society Open Science (The Royal Society), Frontiers in Robotics and AI (Frontiers In), and Frontiers in Big Data (Frontiers In).

Bouffanais was educated at École Normale Supérieure de Lyon and holds an 'Agrégation' in Physical Sciences (major in Physics). He earned his Ph.D. in Computational Science from the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), for which he was awarded the prestigious IBM Research Prize in Computational Sciences (2008) and the ERCOFTAC Da Vinci Award Silver Medal (2007). He has been a postdoctoral fellow and associate in the School of Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and still holds a Research Affiliate appointment with MIT. Bouffanais also worked as a scientific collaborator in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Geneva in 2010-2011. Prior to joining the University of Geneva, Bouffanais was a faculty member (from 2011 to 2020, with tenure in 2018) at the Singapore University of Technology and Design before joining the faculty of the University of Ottawa in Canada in 2020.