Biography & Profile
About
PhD candidate researching responsible AI and AI governance for generative AI systems, with higher education as a primary application domain.
Biranchi Poudyal
PhD Candidate · Charles Darwin University · Sydney, Australia
Professional biography
I am a PhD candidate based in Sydney, Australia, researching the governance and responsible deployment of generative AI systems. My work centres on a practical governance question: as AI systems take on more cognitive and decision-making work, how do institutions preserve human oversight, accountability and authority over outcomes that matter? Higher education — where this question is playing out fastest — is my primary application domain and evidence base, not the limit of the underlying research question.
Institution: Charles Darwin University, Australia · Program: Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) in Generative AI
Before commencing doctoral research, I built a research and writing career spanning international relations, journalism and digital content strategy — including a research fellowship at the Institute of South Asian Studies, Sichuan University, several years as a senior researcher and writer for a Nepal-based research centre, and a hands-on internship on a generative-AI model-training project. That combination of formal research training and applied AI industry experience now grounds my doctoral work.
Outside the doctoral project, I build practical research tools — AI-governance evaluation pipelines, decision frameworks and a live AI-assisted thinking tool — that put my research principles into working software. See Projects.
PhD research
My doctoral research, "The Role of Generative AI and Agency in the Epistemological Foundations of Contemporary Pedagogy," examines how epistemic agency — a learner's capacity to form, justify and take responsibility for knowledge — is preserved, redistributed or eroded when cognitive work is shared with AI systems. It investigates the impact of generative AI on knowledge formation, learning processes and educational agency in contemporary pedagogy, and sits within my broader research programme on AI governance and responsible AI deployment, for which higher education is currently the most tested application domain.
Institution: Charles Darwin University, Australia · Supervisor: Dr Jon Mason, Associate Professor in Education (e-Learning), Faculty of Arts & Society · Status: Ongoing
Research interests
- Responsible AI
- AI governance in higher education
- Human–AI co-agency
- Generative AI in education
- Academic integrity
- Assessment policy
- Epistemic agency
- Distributed cognition & cognitive offloading
Methodological experience
Systematic literature review, scoping review, qualitative coding, thematic analysis, discourse analysis, conceptual synthesis, and document and policy analysis. Each method is described in detail on the Research page.
Skills
Professional goals
I am seeking roles and collaborations in responsible AI, AI governance, AI policy analysis, generative AI research, academic integrity and technical/research writing — work where rigorous analysis of how institutions govern AI systems translates into policy and practice they can actually use. Higher education remains a core application area, alongside broader AI governance and assurance work.
Values and research principles
Verification before publication
No claim, finding or AI-generated text is published without being checked by a human against its source.
Fictional cases, clearly labelled
Any illustrative student case is invented for research and teaching purposes and is labelled as such — never presented as real.
Proportionate, evidence-based judgement
Integrity and policy conclusions follow from documented evidence and reasoning, not from assumption or detector output.
Human accountability for AI-assisted work
Where AI assists my research or writing process, a human remains responsible for meaning, accuracy and final approval.
Qualifications, employment history, publications and awards shown on this site reflect verified CV details.