The TLC lab gladly and proudly announces that, on June 9th 2026, Nandini Bharadwaj defended her PhD dissertation, “Examining how Children Understand and Learn From Conversational Artificial Intelligence Technologies, such as Voice-Based Digital Assistants.”

Dr. Bharadwaj joined the TLC lab in 2020, following careers as a Grade 7 – 12 educator, then a Vice President at Goldman Sachs, and then returning to academia to earn an undergraduate degree in cognitive science at York University.

During her M.A., she led a multinational study of how parents and children use voice assistants in the home and how parents regulate their children’s use. At the same time, she collaborated with Dr. Dubé to develop the Theory of Artificial Minds to understand how people conceive of AI. This work was published in the Sage Handbook of Human-Machine Communication, a remarkable achievement.

During her PhD, she combined her expertise in child-AI interaction with a passion for informing public discourse and policy. She was awarded a sought-after Impact Fellowship with Children & Screens, where she quickly distinguished herself and helped develop policy statements and initiatives on the impact of AI on children. She also published highly-read public pieces in The Conversation on the role of AI in education and child-AI friendships. Her PhD research further developed the ToAM by systematically reviewing the diverse, interdisciplinary theories and methods used to study child-AI interaction (which she published in CHI!). She then developed novel measures and experimentally tested how children learn from AI and how they think AI thinks—can it hold false beliefs, does it have intensions, does it think like a person or a machine? All of this was supported by Doctoral scholarships from both the Quebec FRQSC and Federal SSHRC governments.

You can find her at everyone.ai as a AI in education and child development researcher, where she  contributed to a policy report mapping the impacts of generative AI on children development presented at the G7 on June 15th, less than a week after her PhD defence. 

Dr. Bharadwaj is a deep thinker, a keen articulator of her positions, and a shining example of how scholarship can and should inform public discourse. The TLC lab will always remember collaborating, debating, and laughing with Dr. Nandini Bharadwaj.