Biography

Dr. Sushant Kumar is an Assistant Professor and Assistant Dean of Social Outreach at Jindal School of Government and Public Policy and a Fellow of Cyrill Shroff Centre for AI, Law and Regulation. He has been a Fellow of the Harvard Kennedy School, Program in Science, Technology and Society and is a PhD in Public Policy from Northeastern University, Boston.

He is primarily interested in social and historical construction of scientific ideas and technological artifacts, aimed at understanding how dominant policy ideas come to be, how science legitimizes policy ideas, and how scientific evidence itself is socio-politically situated. His current research spans governance and ethics of Artificial Intelligence and its construction in public, media and political discourse, anticipatory governance, responsible innovation and science and technology policy broadly. He is working on various projects to this end, including a Red Teaming exercise to analyze caste bias in Claude and ChatGPT, Media and Parliamentary discourse of AI in India in the recent years, water usage of AI data centers in India, among others. He deploys interdisciplinary analytical frameworks from public policy, Science and Technology Studies and political communication in his work.

He is one of the knowledge architects of the Generative AI Network (GAIN) project, a global collaboration of scholars and practitioners from 14 countries, emphasizing South-South exchanges decentring AI discourse from centers of privilege and power.

Another strand of his research, building upon his doctoral thesis, analyses social construction of science behind the family planning policy of two-child norm in India. In this stream of research, he has worked with the UN Family Planning Agency (UNFPA) to author policy report titled, Reimagining Family Planning in India: New Pathways for the Government of India, exploring pathways to attain FP2030 goals, and has also developed coursework for the IGOT platform on the theme of Population Dynamics and its Implications on Public Policy.

He has taught courses across U.S and India in Governing Artificial Intelligence, Introduction to Public Policy, Science, Technology and Public Policy, Techniques of Policy Analysis and Data Analysis using Python.

His work has been published in leading journals including The Lancet, Journal of South Asian Studies, Economic and Political Weekly, Behavioral Sciences, and appears regularly in leading media platforms including The Indian Express, The Wire, and Scroll.in.