Stéphanie Lavaux
Rector, Universidad del Rosario, Colombia
Stéphanie Lavaux is the Rector of Universidad del Rosario (founded in 1653), where she took office on 26 October 2026. A French-born academic who has lived and worked in Colombia for more than twenty-six years, she brings to the role the critical distance of someone who arrived from elsewhere and the commitment of someone who chose Colombia as home. Her mandate rests on one ambition -positioning Rosario as the most innovative university in Colombia and Latin America- and on a signature idea, disoñar (to dream and design at once), that runs through her entire agenda.
Before her election she served for six years as Senior Vice-Rector for Academic Affairs at UNIMINUTO, one of the largest private university systems in Colombia, where she led academic strategy, quality, and transformation across a multi-campus institution serving students from the country’s most vulnerable regions. Earlier in her career she was Provost of Universidad del Rosario itself. She is Vice-President of DG2, an international network of francophone universities.
Her most visible contribution to higher-education innovation is SAPIENS, the AI-driven academic ecosystem she created at UNIMINUTO: a family of institution-wide learning agents that reached more than 40,000 active users in 2025. At Rosario, her rectoral agenda carries the same conviction to a new scale: a Nueva Expedición Botánica para el Siglo XXI, a large interdisciplinary research enterprise reconnecting Colombia’s biodiversity legacy with artificial intelligence, genomics and planetary health; a Human-AI Design Factory; an Institute for the Futures of Education and Learning; and a “multiversity” model.
A political scientist by training (Sciences Po Toulouse; DEA in International Relations, Université des Sciences Sociales de Toulouse; IHEDN, Paris), she earned a doctorate summa cum laude in Educational Innovation with an emphasis on agentic AI.