Academic Website

I'm a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Management and Org. Dept of Kellogg School of Management and Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems. My research falls under Computational Social Science and addresses the dynamics in technology, the structure of human knowledge, and the organization of work.

I study the interplay between technology and human knowledge: you can do most things either by relying primarily on a tool or primarily on your skills. For example, you can solve a system of linear equations with a (good enough) calculator or apply your knowledge of matrix algebra using a pen and paper. The same idea extends to every task an economy does.

How should we divide and organize tasks between technology and human skills? What technologies should we in invent? And what skills should we develop? Ideally, we'd want answers that help the economy grow, the firm to succeed, and the human workers to get a fair share of the generated value. The answers my research offers are at the interplay of complexity, organizational science, innovation, and studies of the future of work.

I received my Ph.D. in Management Information Systems (thesis: "Structure of Knowledge and the Role of General Capital.") I was trained as an industrial engineer (BSc and MSc), and my field experience influences my empirically-grounded approach to using large volumes of data for scientific insights and policy. My research uses computational tools and network analysis, econometrics, and machine learning.

AOM 2024: My Presentation on AI and Innovation

How does AI reshape firms' innovation? If interested in the topic and at AOM 2024, stop by my presentation, a selected CTO best paper, "Influence of Artificial Intelligence on Firm Innovation Behavior." Mon, Aug 12, 3-4:30 pm Sheraton: Columbus A QR to the AOM event below

Conference News - IC2S2

I presented my paper, A Complexity Approach to Human Capital, a collaboration with Hyejin Youn, Frank Neffke and LT Zhang at IC2S2 2024 in Philly—mind the drawing behind me on the board!!! Find a preprint here: https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.15629

Job Update

I will start as a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Dept. of Management & Organizations of Kellogg School of Management in Jan 2024.

PhD Graduation

PhDed (on a cold windy Chicago day).

PhD Dissertation Defended

Oct 26, 2023. I defended my dissertation titled: Structure of Knowledge and the Role of General Capital.

Presentation (HKS Growth Lab)

Mar 20, 2023 - Joint presentation of my collaboration with Hyejin Youn, Frank Neffke, and LT Zhang on skill structure at Harvard Growth Lab. Join us in person or online.

NICO Lightning Talk - Unpacking Human Capital Using Occupational Data

NICO Lightning Talk - Unpacking Human Capital Using Occupational Data

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ABOUT
In my free time, I enjoy playing soccer and volleyball, skiing, music, cooking, and bugging my cat, Mocha. I'm an avid reader and love to learn new languages— I speak Persian and English and a bit of French (now probably broken French), and I am trying to learn Mandarin. I love three things in particular: coffee, ice cream, and coffee ice cream!

Academic Journey:
I received my bachelor's and master's degrees in Industrial Engineering and Systems. I have worked as a Systems and Process Engineer in several small companies and spent almost a year as an Engineer-in-residence at Caterpillar Inc. My industry experiences, in many ways, motivate my research on productivity and the changes in the structure of work, induced by technical change and innovation.

Before starting my Ph.D. journey in Information Systems, most of my research focused on Machine Learning using Fuzzy Logic (If you haven't heard of it, it's an alternative way of reasoning or logic to the more common statistical framework that dominates Machine Learning today). I worked at the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at Amirkabir University during my bachelor's, working on several projects. Later, I did my master's thesis on improving Machine Learning on incomplete data by applying Fuzzy Logic (Type II).