Research and teaching Chairs at Sciences Po explore issues at the heart of public debate and contemporary challenges. They serve a dual purpose: advancing understanding of today’s world through research, and enriching the content of our academic programs.

Each Chair is affiliated with a school or a research center. Its governance is overseen by an independent Scientific Committee, which defines the research agenda. This committee brings together permanent faculty members from Sciences Po as well as external experts and scholars from partner or peer institutions. Alongside it, a Steering Committee—comprising donor representatives, the Chair holder, and their team—ensures the implementation of the Chair’s activities.

Chair for the Study of Religion

The Chair for the Study of Religion, created in 2020, aims to promote the development of research related to religion and to support social science education related to such subjects. Connected to Sciences Po’s Centre of International Studies (CERI), the Chair is co-directed by CNRS Research Professor Alain Dieckhoff and Associate Professor at Sciences Po and Researcher at CERI Stéphane Lacroix.

The goals of the Chair include uniting researchers of religious studies; proposing religious studies undergraduate and doctoral coursework to Sciences Po; participating in public and academic debate, and supporting the next generation of researchers. 

Groupe Bayard supports the Chair.

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Overseas and Global Changes Chair

Inaugurated in May 2025 at Sciences Po under the direction of Camille Mazé-Lambrechts, the Overseas and Global Changes Chair, based at CEVIPOF, aims to examine the socio-political, legal, environmental, climatic, and strategic transformations that overseas territories are undergoing in the face of major global challenges.

Global changes refer to the set of large-scale modifications affecting the planet and the human societies that depend on its health. It encompasses all environmental, biophysical, economic, social, and technological processes that are transforming the Earth system and our ways of life. In return, it requires an integrated understanding and the commitment to transformations in governance, practices, values, and representations.

Overseas territories are considered to be both on the front line of global change and laboratories of experimentation and innovation that can act as drivers on a global scale.

In this context, the Chair has redefined its missions, objectives, and actions around global change, both in terms of research and in its training activities for students, civil servants and senior officials, policymakers, and local stakeholders. It is intended to contribute to raising awareness and visibility of overseas territories at Sciences Po and beyond, to strengthen knowledge, and to open debate with civil society by organizing targeted and public events.

The Chair structures its work around several priority areas:

• the analysis of biophysical, climatic, health, and security risks;
• the study of democratic dynamics and sovereignty issues, the process of self-determination, and contextual normative adaptations;
• the assessment of ecosystem health and sustainability trajectories;
• the co-construction of transformative governance scenarios.

Its interdisciplinary approach in the human, social, political, and legal sciences is enriched through dialogue with the environmental humanities, life and earth sciences, and sustainability science, integrating local knowledge, customary practices, and cultural diversity.

The Chair relies on the Ethics and Strategic Committee and a Scientific Council, connected to a network of non-academic partners. Finally, it runs a program for Young Ambassadors of the Overseas & Global Changes Chair (JA OMEGA).

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Health Chair

Created in 2006, the Health Chair reimagines public health and its variants through an interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary lens: healthcare system regulation, healthcare services organisation, the impact of new technology, health-related public policy, particularly pertaining to aging and nutrition. 

Connected to the Centre for the Sociology of Organisations (CSO), the Health Chair is directed by doctor and previous Inspector General of Social Affairs Gilles Duhamel and CNRS Research Director and CSO Researcher Daniel Benamouzig.

The Chair benefits from the support of the Department of Health, Public Health France, the Île-de-France Regional Agency of Health,  the CNAM, Unicancer and CNOI.

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