Bernardo Mackenna

Welcome!

I am a social scientist by training, a researcher by profession, and an educator by calling. If you're curious, here you can see my academic genealogy tree. Currently, I'm a Postdoctoral Scholar and New Map of Life Fellow at Stanford University's Center on Longevity.

I received my Ph.D. in Sociology and Computational Social Science at the University of California, San Diego, and both my undergraduate and master's degree in Sociology from the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, where I also served as adjunct assistant professor. 

My research asks how the institutions that sort people and the relationships that connect them shape their beliefs, well-being, and opportunities across the life course. Working at the intersection of social stratification, social networks, and demography and aging, I study how schools, markets, and clinical systems classify people; how personal networks connect and divide them, shaping social cohesion and public opinion; and how both become embodied in health and aging. I combine longitudinal and cross-national surveys, linked administrative, credit, and biomarker data, preregistered experiments, and computational text analysis to identify the causal mechanisms behind these processes. Learn more about my current projects. 

My research has been recognized with the UCSD Chancellor’s Dissertation Medal, the Geoffrey Tootell outstanding dissertation in Mathematical Sociology award from the American Sociological Association, the Alexis de Tocqueville Award from the World Association of Public Opinion Research (WAPOR), as well as the Edgardo Catterberg Best Paper Award from WAPOR's Latin American chapter.