Leadership
Prof. Roland Bouffanais
Associate Professor at UNIGE
Dr. Roland Bouffanais is a Complexity Scientist and Associate Professor at the University of Geneva, Switzerland. Bouffanais leads the Applied Complexity Group (ACG) and conducts interdisciplinary research at the interface between Complexity Science, Multi-Agent Dynamics, Network Science, Computational Social Science, Data Science, including Artificial Intelligence. His research involves a synergistic combination of computational and theoretical developments, with real-life experimental validations. Bouffanais aims to foster cross-disciplinary exploration to gain insight into a range of complex systems including social networks, swarm intelligence, complex urban systems, human dynamics, etc. With his research group, they maintain a constructive and open dialogue between science, society and industry.
Prof. Livia Schubiger
Full Professor @ ETH Zurich
Livia Schubiger is a Professor of International Relations and Data Science at ETH Zurich. Her research focuses on the social and institutional implications of violence and conflict, and on avenues to reduce wartime and gender-based violence. Current projects leverage novel data collection and analysis techniques to examine state-led atrocities against civilians during war; attitudes towards the use of force; norms surrounding intimate partner violence; and consequences of activism against gender-based violence. Methodologically, her research straddles multiple levels of analysis from the local to the international and draws on a broad variety of strategies for data collection and analysis. Livia Schubiger’s work has been published or is forthcoming in the American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, International Organization, Journal of Politics, Comparative Political Studies, Journal of Conflict Resolution, and Journal of Peace Research, among others.
Prof. Didier Wernli
Associate Professor at UNIGE
Didier Wernli is an Associate Professor and the Deputy Director for research at the Global Studies Institute of the University of Geneva. His research focuses on the global governance of infectious diseases from a One Health perspective. He is particularly interested in resilience, institutional complexity, adaptive governance, and the link between evidence and policies in the global context. Didier is the co-founder and Director of the Geneva Transformative Governance Lab which pioneers collaborative research on global challenges. Currently, Didier teaches about global health, interdisciplinary methodology, and global systems science in the Master of global health and the Bachelor of International relations, where he is responsible for the Orientation en études globales. Didier coordinates the doctoral school of the Global Studies Institute. Didier holds a medical doctorate (MD) from the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Geneva, a master’s degree (MA) in international affairs from the Graduate Institute of International and Development studies, and an interdisciplinary doctorate (PhD) from the Global Studies Institute of the University of Geneva. From 2018 to 2021, Didier was a visiting Assistant Professor at the School of Public Health of the University of Hong Kong.
Team
Dr Stephan Davidshofer
Lab Manager at UNIGE
Since 2018, Dr Stephan Davidshofer has been working as Academic Advisor of the Master of Advanced Studies (MAS) in International and European Security jointly run by the GCSP and the Global Studies Institute (GSI) of the University of Geneva. With a PhD from Sciences Po Paris, Stephan has been researching and teaching in the field of Critical Security Studies for the past fifteen years. Interested about the challenges raised by the management of today’s transnational security threats, he has contributed to several research projects investigating the evolving European security landscape from the Peace Research institute in Oslo and the University of Geneva. Stephan is also currently a lecturer at the University of Geneva’s Global Studies institute. Dr. Davidshofer speaks French, English and Portuguese.
Dr Jean-Luc Falcone
Senior Researcher at UNIGE
Jean-Luc Falcone is a senior researcher and lecturer at the University of Geneva. After studying biology, he obtained in 2008 an interdisciplinary PhD in biology and computer science. Since 2010, he holds the position of HPC application analyst at CADMOS (Center for the Advanced Modelling of Science). His research interests include bioinformatics, multi-science models, multi-scale systems and parallel computing.
Dr Simon Gabay
Research and Teaching Fellow at UNIGE
Simon Gabay is a philologist. After a thesis in the history of medieval theatre, he became interested in computational philology, specialising in the modern (French) period. He works in particular on the extraction and enrichment of data from ancient documents, both printed and manuscript. Simon Gabay joined the SiDLab to develop an automated pipeline for text processing (including layout analysis, optical character recognition, data enrichment and standardisation) and analysis with stylometry.
Mr Seyed-Moeen Hosseinalipour
PhD Candidate and Teaching Assistant at UNIGE
Seyed-Moeen Hosseinalipour is a PhD candidate in interdisciplinary global studies and a teaching and research assistant at the University of Geneva. He holds a BSc in Medical Laboratory Sciences from Tehran University of Medical Sciences, an MSc in Global Health from the University of Geneva, and an MA in International Affairs from the Geneva Graduate Institute. Under the joint supervision of Prof. Didier Wernli and Prof. Roland Bouffanais, Moeen’s research focuses on global health governance, specifically the governance of infectious diseases, biosecurity, and pandemics, using computational methods. He has worked as a junior consultant for the WHO in the Health Emergencies Program and as a research assistant at both the Geneva Centre of Humanitarian Studies and the Global Health Centre of the Geneva Graduate Institute, researching pandemic governance, global health policy, and access to vaccines for refugees. Previously, Moeen was a Youth for Biosecurity Fellow at the UN Office for Disarmament Affairs. He has also held visiting positions at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Duke University, the Swiss School of Public Health, the Technical University of Berlin, and the University of Basel.
Dr Daniela Scherer
Research and Teaching Fellow at UNIGE
Dr. Daniela Scherer is an interdisciplinary scientist focusing on negotiations and multilateral decision making, European studies, security studies, and interdisciplinary methodologies. She obtained her BSc and MSc in physics from ETH Zurich spending one year at the NTNU in Norway, and joining the IBM Zurich Research Laboratory in Rüschlikon for her Master’s thesis.
Daniela Scherer obtained her PhD under the supervision of the former State Secretary and Chief Negotiator of the Swiss-EU Bilateral II agreements, Prof. Michael Ambühl, at ETH Zurich and Prof. James W. Davis at HSG. She was a visiting researcher at the Princeton University and at the Woodrow Wilson International Center in Washington DC. She also co-led national mediations in the energy and environmental sector and co-authored an expert opinion on the Swiss-EU negotiations of the IFA.
Mr Genis Skura
PhD Candidate and Teaching Assistant at UNIGE
Genis holds a BSc in Computer Engineering from the Polytechnical University of Tirana (2020) and a MSc in Computer Science from the University of Geneva (2023). His master’s thesis, supervised by Dr. Jean Luc Falcone and Prof. Antoine Geissbühler, focused on automatic annotation through NLP engineering for global health and medical documents. He gained two years of experience as a Full Stack Developer and Researcher at the Geneva Digital Health Hub in Campus Biotech. Currently, he is a PhD candidate researching automatic knowledge building and applied NLP in diplomatic, legal, and global health corpora while also working as a teaching assistant for the Natural Language Processing course at the University of Geneva. His main interests span Machine Learning, NLP, LLMs, Named Entity Recognition, Topic Modelling, and Data Analysis.
Affiliated faculty members
Prof. Bastien Chopard
Honorary Professor at UNIGE
Bastien Chopard is honorary professor at the University of Geneva, and group leader in the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics. He earned his PhD in theoretical physics from the University of Geneva in 1988. He then spent two years as a postdoc in the laboratory for computer science at MIT (Cambridge, USA), and one year in the Research Center, Juelich (Germany) before joining the computer science department at University of Geneva. His main research interests is the modeling and simulation of complex systems. He is internationally recognized for his work on Cellular Automata and Lattice Boltzmann methods. He wrote more than 300 scientific articles, presenting interdisciplinary research in various fields, such as physics, social and environmental science, bio-medical applications, numerical and optimization methods, parallel computing and multiscale modeling.
Prof. Nicolas Levrat
Full Professor at UNIGE
Professor Nicolas Levrat (LL.D., public international law) is a professor at the Faculty of Law of the University of Geneva since 2001. He is the director of Global Studies Institute (GSI) and co-founder of the Geneva Transformative Governance Lab. Professor Levrat teaches European law, territorial communities and European integration, as well as federalism and democracy in Europe, and the law of international organizations. His research focuses on European institutional law, European legal order(s), the status of public bodies in Europe, the law of minority groups, cross-border cooperation, governance in Europe, complex institutional systems and Switzerland-Europe relations. Professor Levrat is also an associate member of the ULB’s Center for International Law and Public Law Center, co-founder of the Transfrontier and Cross-Territorial Standards Research Network (RENTI), member of the Academic Council of the School Erasmus Globalization Europe and Multilateralism (GEM), co-director of the Swiss Doctoral School on the Foundations of European and International Law, member of the Editorial Board of the Belgian Journal of International Law, member of the Board of Directors of the Journal EU-Topias, member of the Steering Committee of the European Center of Culture and Vice-President of the International Meeting of Geneva.