Washington, DC is building the future of GRC

Gopal Kharbanda is a technology risk, governance, and internal audit leader with over 20 years of experience in financial services, including HSBC, Goldman Sachs, BNP Paribas, Freddie Mac, and Citizens Bank.

His expertise spans cybersecurity, technology risk management, internal audit, and GRC transformation, with a focus on leveraging AI, automation, and emerging technologies to modernize risk and control practices.

As President of the GRC Engineering Club’s Washington, DC Chapter, Gopal is passionate about bridging traditional GRC disciplines with modern engineering approaches. He is committed to building a collaborative community where professionals can share knowledge, develop practical skills, and explore innovative solutions to real-world GRC challenges.

What bothered Jonathan Perez most about GRC wasn't the complexity of compliance. It was seeing gaps uncovered shortly after an assessment had already been completed. After more than 11 years in cybersecurity, those experiences made him question how assessments were being performed and whether the process itself needed to change.

He wanted to be more thorough, efficient, and effective without simply adding more work. The challenge was figuring out how. That started to change when his friend Imran introduced him to a book and someone in the GRC engineering space. What began as curiosity opened the door to a different way of approaching his work.

Today, Jonathan is putting those ideas into practice by building workflows, developing tools, and exploring automation for continuous compliance, assessments, and vulnerability management. He brings years of hands-on experience to the table, but recognizes there's still plenty to learn. Through the DC GRC Engineering Chapter, he's looking forward to exchanging ideas, challenging assumptions, and building solutions alongside others.

Because being good at what you do doesn't mean you should stop questioning how it's done.

Nicole Pounds is a Senior Manager and Portfolio Lead at SecureIT, where she helps organizations build and maintain security and compliance programs. Her work focuses on continuous compliance and practical ways to reduce manual effort through GRC engineering.

After years of collecting screenshots and sitting through audit interviews, Nicole joined the GRC Engineering Club to strengthen her technical skills and explore better ways to approach compliance. She has since applied what she’s learned to help develop SecureIT’s GRC engineering offering, connecting her advisory experience with more repeatable, automated approaches.

Through the Washington, DC chapter, Nicole looks forward to bringing practitioners together to share ideas, learn from one another, and work through real challenges. She values a community where people can ask questions, try something new, and share what they learn along the way.

Grace Adjeli is the Founder of BridgeCore AI and an AI Governance and Security practitioner whose work focuses on turning governance requirements into operational controls and verifiable evidence.

Her background spans cybersecurity, cloud engineering, enterprise technology, risk management, and Agile leadership in regulated environments. Through her Governance at Execution™ research, she examines how organizations can maintain authorization, accountability, and oversight as AI systems operate under changing conditions.

Grace develops governance frameworks, technical architectures, and practical demonstrations that connect policy decisions to system behavior. She holds AIGP, CISSP, PMP, and SSCP credentials. Her doctoral research at Capitol Technology University explores ethical frameworks for human and AI collaboration in cybersecurity decision making.

Dex Copeland is Head of Growth and Training for the GRC Engineering Club, where he builds the training paths and hands-on labs that help practitioners move past checkbox compliance and start engineering the systems behind it. He also helps the community grow through local chapters and programs that welcome new members in.

By day, he's the AI Governance Manager for a State government, working where GRC and AI meet: deciding how new AI tools can be adopted safely and what evidence actually shows a risk is managed, without letting governance become the thing that stalls good work. Teaching and mentoring sit at the center of everything he does, and he's happiest when someone who never thought of themselves as technical ships their first automation and can explain exactly why it works.

Whether he's building curriculum, reviewing an AI system, or talking shop with a new chapter member, Dex's focus stays on making GRC more practical and more open to people who are ready to learn by building.