Paul Jorion is Doctor in the Social Sciences from the Free University Brussels. He holds MAs in sociology and social anthropology. He’s lectured at the universities of Brussels, Cambridge (Department of Social Anthropology), Paris VIII (Department of Psychoanalysis) and at the University of California at Irvine (Regents’ Lectureship). He was also a United Nations Officer (FAO), working on development projects in Africa.

Paul Jorion is a one-man band of the Cognitive Sciences and a well–respected expert in Artificial Intelligence (seminar at Maison des Sciences de l’Homme ; British Telecom Fellowship ; producer of a set of broadcasts on that theme on France–Culture ; numerous lectures at Yale University, École Normale Supérieure, etc.). Heir of (among others) Luc de Heusch, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Sir Edmund Leach, Jacques Lacan and Georges-Théophile Guilbaud, his training in social anthropology has led him on various field trips, be it on the Island of Houat in Brittany or in West Africa. He is the author of several books, among which Les pêcheurs de Houat (Hermann: 1983), La transmission des savoirs (with Geneviève Delbos, Éditions de la Maison des Sciences de l’Homme: 1984) and Principes des systèmes intelligents (Paris: Masson, 1990), as well as of many papers, published in particular in L'Homme. He’s also an Associate of Behavioral and Brain Sciences (BBS) and one of the editors of Mathematical Anthropology and Cultural Theory.

In 1993, being invited by the head of the Maison des Sciences de l’Homme in Paris, Maurice Aymard, he founded a think-tank named Théorie et Clinique des Pathologies de la Pensée, which would become STP : Sujet, Théorie et Praxis.

For the most recent ten years Paul Jorion has been working in the American finance world as a pricing specialist. Prior to this he was at one time a trader on the futures markets in a French investment bank. He wrote a book on the consequences for the stock market of the bankruptcy of Enron: Investing in a Post-Enron World (McGraw-Hill: 2003).

On September 4th, 2007, in an op-ed for the French daily Le Monde, he proposes that, as is the case for the political sphere, the economy is given a proper constitution (L’économie a besoin d’une authentique constitution).

He is a Visiting Scholar of the "Human Complex Systems" Program at UCLA.

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