Ritchie gave a spotlight session, “People, Not Systems: AI, Belonging and Readiness,” and joined the closing leadership panel on what must change next in higher education. Much of the session was built around his teaching at �鶹��Ƶ.

During his Fulbright year, Ritchie taught The AI Revolution at �鶹��Ƶ, a course he co-created at Warwick. �鶹��Ƶ students and Warwick students took on the same assignment in two very different classrooms, imagining possible futures shaped by AI and writing policy briefs to people with the power to act on them. One �鶹��Ƶ first-year student argued the course should be compulsory for every �鶹��Ƶ student. Comparing the two classrooms shaped the talk’s central argument: students are not the readiness problem; institutions are.

The work of Zach Conklin ’28 and other students from the course is featured throughout. In class, Conklin wrote on the whiteboard that “the hardest problems aren’t technical. They’re human.” Ritchie used the line to close his talk. Conklin has since become one of the �鶹��Ƶ student editors of a joint �鶹��Ƶ–Warwick special issue of “Reinvention: an International Journal of Undergraduate Research,” on AI and the final-year research experience.

The talk also drew on “Your Place in the World: Exploring Identity, Sustainability, and AI,” the course Ritchie taught at the �鶹��Ƶ Academy summer program. Scholars co-wrote their own honor code before using AI, then recreated hand-drawn designs with AI tools and reflected on what the technology made, what they made, and how they handled bias along the way.

“Money buys adoption. People make readiness,” Ritchie said. “The students at �鶹��Ƶ showed me that, in the classroom and at the Academy.”

The award follows the AI in Learning Excellence Award Ritchie received from Echo360 this summer.

The special issue, “AI and the Final-Year Research Experience: Transatlantic Perspectives,” is a collaboration between �鶹��Ƶ 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 �鶹��Ƶ 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 �鶹��Ƶ, where he taught Conklin and Collins in his course ‘The AI Revolution’.

“So many of my conversations with �鶹��Ƶ 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 �鶹��Ƶ 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 �鶹��Ƶ; 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 .

The course asked scholars three of the biggest questions they’ll face heading into college and beyond.

• Who are you?
• How does the world around you work?
• Where do you belong in it?

Answering those questions meant building a team that could bring three different lenses to the room, not one guest lecturer parachuted in for an afternoon, but three weeks, three educators and one shared arc.

The design work started long before anyone boarded a flight. Jess Savage and Yanyan Li, both from Warwick, along with Aoife Prendergast from TUS Ireland, worked with Ritchie from early on to shape the course’s structure and pedagogy. Amanda Lang and Jo Kukuczka from Warwick also helped shape the wider exchange from the start, thinking through how a course like this could work across institutions with genuinely different academic cultures. �鶹��Ƶ Assistant Teaching Professor of Wellness Evan Small, �鶹��Ƶ Academy Director Emily Wiersma, and the �鶹��Ƶ Academy team helped the team turn their planning into a course that actually happened, on the ground, with real scholars.

In June 2026, that design became three weeks of teaching. Savage led the first week, taking scholars outside to investigate the natural world of �鶹��Ƶ’s campus, observing and mapping the environment and asking who shapes it and how they could begin to understand sustainability differently. Li led the second week, turning to the digital world, unpacking what AI is, whose values it carries, and how to use it with honesty and critical thought. Prendergast led the third week, joining the class from Ireland as the s first Transatlantic Teaching Fellow. She turned the lens on the scholars themselves: their story, their strengths, their future, and what belonging looked and felt like for them.

Belonging wasn’t confined to Prendergast’s week; it ran through all three, as the thread underneath the environment, the AI and the identity work alike. Scholars kept a reflective journal throughout, used photography in the first week to document their experience, and carried a logo and motto project across all three weeks: hand-drawn in Week 1, recreated with AI in Week 2 under a co-created and scholar-drafted honor code, then made personal in Week 3 as their final project, representing their own identity, values and vision for the future.

“That arc worked because an international team built it together, then taught it together, each trusting the ones before and after them to carry it forward,” said Ritchie. “So much of Fulbright’s work is about building bridges between UK and US institutions. But a bridge only matters once people walk across it, and once the people crossing it have had a hand in building it too. That’s what this collaboration set out to do: curriculum design, planning, and teaching, shared genuinely across three institutions, not handed from one to another.”

Join colleagues and students from �鶹��Ƶ, University of Warwick, University of Leeds and partner institutions for a transatlantic collaboration exploring critical questions in higher education teaching. This series is convened by Tom Ritchie, US-UK Fulbright Scholar and visiting professor at �鶹��Ƶ from the University of Warwick, working with Sarah Bunnell and colleagues at CATL.

This partnership brings together:

• �鶹��Ƶ’s Center for the Advancement of Teaching & Learning (CATL)
• (WIHEA) and (IATL)
• (LITE)
• Members of the UK SoTL alliance
• Colleagues and students from Canadian universities

Each session will feature a short presentation from one of the partner institutions, followed by facilitated small group discussions and sharing across institutions. All sessions run 11 a.m.to Noon EST via Microsoft Teams. Participants may join individual sessions or participate in the full series.

Schedule:

• Feb. 11: What makes teaching “excellent” in your context?
• March 4: How do we teach for a sustainable future – embedding sustainability across disciplines?
• March 25: Belonging and exclusion – frameworks for understanding and action
• April 15: Teaching in the age of AI – opportunities and boundaries
• May 6: How can assessment drive learning – not just measure it?
• May 20: Building transatlantic partnerships – what could we create together?

Register for sessions