advancing education & promoting learner agency and decision-making skills for the AI era
Yuliya Yoncheva, PhD is a neuroscientist and decision scientist studying whether AI-generated feedback produces genuine learning or the appearance of it.
Her research connects three questions not yet answered together: How do humans build genuine expertise when algorithms increasingly model it? What happens to judgment and metacognition when AI mediates the learning relationship? How do we design frameworks that make these capacities transferable across contexts?
She is Principal Investigator on the AI Communication Compass grant (Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation), one of three nationally-selected AI in Medical Education projects, examining calibration accuracy and learner agency in graduate professional training. A parallel line of work, presented at (Re)Designing Pedagogy for the GenAI Era (2026), pilots a three-phase discovery-based scaffold for teaching values-based decision-making through generative AI simulation, with a 30-student PhD cohort.
Yuliya co-founded the POD Network’s AI in Education Special Interest Group (3,000+ members), facilitates a grassroots peer community for decision science practitioners, and moderated a session at the Teaching & Learning with Generative AI Virtual Symposium (2025). Her conference work arc traces early questions of AI literacy and adoption (2023) to the harder problems of redesign and learner agency (2025; 2026).
She is a researcher at NYU Grossman School of Medicine. She writes on Substack about metacognition, decision-making, and the future of human learning.