Raymond Duch is Senior Research Fellow at Nuffield College, University of Oxford, and Long Term Visiting Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse, where he also sits on the Scientific Council. He works on experimental methods in the social sciences, and on what happens to those methods when artificial intelligence enters them.

He co-directs Talking to Machines, an international project using large language models as synthetic subjects in social science experiments — running studies against simulated populations before, and sometimes instead of, running them against real ones. The methodological argument appears in Royal Society Open Science; the most public test to date was a poll of the 2024 US presidential election conducted entirely through digital twins of American voters. He is a co-author of "Public Opinion in the Age of AI", a report of the American Political Science Association’s Presidential Task Force on AI, Politics and Political Science.

The infrastructure behind that work is something he built. He founded Oxford’s Centre for Experimental Social Sciences and directed it from 2008 to 2024, establishing sister laboratories in Chile, China and India; he co-founded the European Political Science Association and the International Meeting on Experimental and Behavioural Social Sciences, both of which now anchor the field in Europe. He has served on the editorial boards of the American Journal of Political Science, Political Science Research and Methods, and the Journal of Experimental Political Science.

His research reaches well beyond the university. He advised the UK Cabinet Office’s Cross-Whitehall Trial Advice Panel on running policy as randomised trials, sat on the OECD’s expert group on measuring the public acceptability of reform, and has led field experiments with health ministries and NGOs — including randomised trials of financial incentives for COVID-19 vaccination in rural Ghana, published in Nature Medicine, and cross-national work on vaccine allocation in PNAS. He is currently working with the Inter-American Development Bank on applying these methods to the evaluation of development programmes. He has served as an expert witness in litigation, advising on the design and interpretation of survey and experimental evidence. He is the author of two books, including The Economic Vote (Cambridge University Press), and founding director of the charity Knowledge Without Borders.

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