I'm Farnam Mohebi, a physician (MD, MPH) and PhD candidate in Management (Macro) at UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business. I am on the 2026-27 academic job market. Before my doctoral studies, I worked as a public health researcher and as a family physician in outpatient and inpatient settings.

Drawing on organizational theory, the sociology of professions and work, and STS, I study how technology changes the way organizations divide professional work, and what that shows about expertise. My current work is on AI and professionals: what happens to expert work when organizations hand part of it to AI.

My dissertation, "Where to Draw the Line: AI, Delegation, and the Reorganization of Expert Work," builds on 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork with radiation oncologists integrating AI into their practice. In my solo-authored job market paper, "Where to Draw the Line: How Delegating Peripheral Tasks Disturbs Professionals' Core Work," now under review at Administrative Science Quarterly, I find that doing some peripheral tasks takes professionals through the case details their core work depends on, so delegating those tasks can undermine the core work they were meant to support. My dissertation proposal won the Management category of the 2026 Mays Business School AI Dissertation Proposal Competition, and the paper is a nominee for the Best Student Paper Award at the 2026 Fisher AI in Business Conference at Ohio State.

You can read my job market paper here.

Methodologically, I pair deep qualitative fieldwork and interview work with quantitative analysis of large-scale data: I came to ethnography from quantitative public health research (30+ peer-reviewed publications, 800+ citations), and I still draw on that training to test the hypotheses and consequences that emerge from the field.

Please find my most recent CV here.

Keywords: Organization Theory / Professions / Expertise / Technology / AI and Work / Ethnography of work