Professor Alain-G. Gagnon has been contributing to debates on the organization and future of small societies and minority nations for forty years. His multidisciplinary work spans a range of analytical fields, from regional development to the sociology of intellectuals, from political economy to federalism and nationalism. From 1982 to 2003, he taught at Queen's, Carleton and McGill universities before joining UQAM in 2003 as Canada Research Chair in Quebec and Canadian Studies.

He is the founding director of the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research on Diversity and Democracy (CRIDAQ), the Research Group on Plurinational Societies (GRSP) and the new Centre for Policy Analysis: Constitution - Federalism (CAPCF).

At RSC, he served as Director of the Francophone Division of the Academy of Social Sciences (2010-2012), before assuming the position of President (2017-2019). He has been elected President of RSC in 2022.

Translated into some twenty languages, his work has earned him several distinctions, including the Governor General's International Award in Canadian Studies (2016), the Ordre de Pléiade (2018), the Mildred A. Schwartz Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Political Science Association (2020). He was appointed Officer of the Order of Canada in 2019 and Member of L’Ordre national du Québec in 2022.