Juan Pardo-Guerra

Juan Pablo Pardo-Guerra is an Associate Professor at the University of California, San Diego, a founding faculty member of the Halicioğlu Data Science Institute, and a Research Fellow at the University of Edinburgh. His research concerns markets and their location in contemporary societies. In his Automating Finance: Infrastructures, Engineers and the Making of Electronic Markets (Cambridge University Press, 2019), he examines the organizational and political tensions at play in developing some of the key infrastructures of British and American stock markets. By looking at how experts in telecommunications created novel niches within stock exchanges, they slowly transformed the machines and imaginaries ofcommunity of their organizations, enabling the transition from trading floors to purely electronic exchanges. Automating Finance combines insights across fields, from the theoretical insights from science and technology studies and the analytical lenses of institutional theory, to anthropological discussions of relations and the economic metaphors of market design. His forthcoming book, The Quantified Scholar, studies labor markets in the British social sciences, focusing on how market-like interventions of quality assessment introduced in the 1980s transformed the practices, career structures, and disciplines of anthropologists, economists, political scientists, and sociologists working in the United Kingdom. Juan Pablo was trained in physics at the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico and science and technology studies at the University of Edinburgh. He has held positions at the London School of Economics and Political Science, the Museu Nacional of the Universidade Federal de Rio de Janeiro, and the University of California San Diego. Juan Pablo’s work has been published in Economy & Society, Journal of Cultural Economy, European Societies, Cultural Sociology, Theory & Society, and the British Journal of Sociology.

Research Interests

• Economic Sociology, with a focus on financial markets, auction houses, and technological innovation.
• Science and Technology Studies, with an emphasis on scientific organizations, cultures, and public policies.
• Computational Social Science, with interests in mixed methods, cultural analysis, and natural language processing.
• Data and society, with a focus on the development, interpretation and use of ML and AI models in practical domains

Education Background

• Licenciatura en Física (BSc in Physics), Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México
• MSc/PhD in Science and Technology Studies, University of Edinburgh
• Certificate in Postgraduate Education, London School of Economics and Political Science

Professional Experience

• Assistant Professor, London School of Economics and Political Science (2010-2015)
• Assistant Professor, UC San Diego (2015-2020)
• Associate Professor, UC San Diego (2020-)
• Associate Director, Latin American Studies Program, UC San Diego (2021-)
• Research Fellow, School of Social and Political Sciences, University of Edinburgh (2016-2020)
• Council Member, Sociology of Culture Section, American Sociological Association (2021-2024)