Martha Poon is completing dissertation work in the Science Studies Program at University of California San Diego. Her research traces the history of the commercial credit scoring technology called a FICO score, innovated by the firm Fair, Isaac & Company Incorporated. Through a Bourse
Chateaubriand Fellowship she has been a visiting student at the CSI-ENSMP in Paris. She has also been a visiting researcher at the Hagley Museum and Library in Wilmington, Delaware. She is currently a visiting scholar at the Centre on Organizational Innovation (Columbia University). Her most recent publication - awarded the 2008 Hacker-Mullins Prize from the Science Knowledge and Technology section of the American Sociological Association - is entitled 'From New Deal Institutions to Capital Markets: Commercial consumer risk scores and the making of subprime mortgage finance' (Accounting, Organization and Society, 2009 (forthcoming)). An article reporting on the earlier findings of her work can be found in the edited volume Market Devices (Blackwell, 2007).