Three Elon students serve on the editorial board of a Reinvention special issue, developed with the University of Warwick, that asks how generative AI is changing final-year research.
Three Elon University students are helping lead a new special issue of Reinvention: an International Journal of Undergraduate Research that will explore how generative artificial intelligence is changing the experience of final-year undergraduate research.
The special issue, “AI and the Final-Year Research Experience: Transatlantic Perspectives,” is a collaboration between Elon and the University of Warwick in the United Kingdom, where Reinvention is based. Zach Conklin ’28, Alyssa Collins ’27 and Chris Guider ’28 serve on the student-led editorial board alongside student editors from Warwick.
The project grew out of Tom Ritchie’s year at Elon as a 2025-26 US-UK Fulbright Commission Visiting Scholar. Ritchie, reader and director of student experience in the Department of Chemistry at Warwick, focused on AI and belonging in course curriculum design during his time at Elon, where he taught Conklin and Collins in his course ‘The AI Revolution’.
“So many of my conversations with Elon students kept coming back to the same question: what does doing your own research look like now that generative AI is part of every stage of it?” Ritchie said. “Students are working this out as they go, often ahead of the guidance written for them. Their experience deserves to be in the literature in their own words, and it means a great deal that Elon students are the ones shaping that conversation.”
The call for papers is open to current undergraduates and recent graduates from any discipline and any institution. Submissions may include research articles, critical reflections and book reviews on topics such as using AI to frame research questions or analyze data, how AI has changed conversations with faculty mentors, academic integrity and disclosure, access and equity, and the decision not to use AI. Reinvention is fully open access, and there is no fee to submit.
The issue will be published alongside a companion special issue of Perspectives on Undergraduate Research and Mentoring (PURM) exploring the same questions from the faculty and staff perspective. That issue is co-edited by Ritchie; Brandon Sheridan, associate professor of economics and Center for the Advancement of Teaching and Learning Pedagogy Fellow at Elon; and Yanyan Li, early-career fellow at the Institute of Advanced Study at Warwick.
“Putting the two issues side by side gives us something unusual,” Ritchie said. “We’ll hear from students and mentors on both sides of the Atlantic about the same moment in undergraduate research, and see where those experiences line up and where they don’t.”
Submissions are due Jan. 6, 2027, and the issue is scheduled for publication in summer 2027.
Full details are available on the call for papers webpage.