Building Global Student Research Capacity Through Open Science Networks

​How can we make authentic scientific research opportunities accessible to every student?

​Scientific knowledge has never been more accessible. Students can increasingly access papers, open datasets, code, computational tools, and scientific communities from almost anywhere. Yet meaningful research opportunities remain out of reach for many secondary-school students, often depending on school resources, access to mentors and research networks, geography, or the ability to pay for private research mentorship.

​This matters even more in the AI era. As producing answers, code, analyses, and explanations becomes easier, the ability to ask good questions, evaluate evidence, recognize uncertainty, challenge conclusions, and determine whether an answer deserves to be believed becomes increasingly valuable. Authentic research is one of the most powerful ways to develop this scientific mindset.

​Join us for Building Global Student Research Capacity Through Open Science Networks, a virtual Science Summit 2026 session exploring how open science, public datasets, research education, mentorship networks, emerging AI tools, and international collaboration can create new pathways into scientific research for students around the world.

​This session is part of Science Summit 2026, held alongside the 81st United Nations General Assembly.

​The discussion will go beyond technology. We will explore how schools, universities, libraries, nonprofits, scientific organizations, and global research networks can work together to build an ecosystem in which students can move from learning about science to actively investigating real-world questions.

​Pika Team will also share early observations from its own experiments combining structured research education, open scientific resources, AI-assisted mentorship, and human guidance to explore what aspects of research mentorship can scale—and where human educators and researchers remain essential.

​The goal is not to turn every student into a professional scientist or to have AI conduct research for them. It is to give more young people the opportunity to experience authentic inquiry: asking questions whose answers are not known, working with evidence, testing assumptions, learning from failure, and defending conclusions.

​September 18, 2026
10:00 AM Pacific / 1:00 PM Eastern
Virtual | Public Session

​Official Science Summit session and registration:
https://event.sciencesummitnyc.org/list-of-sessions/detail/427

​Convened by Pika Team:
https://pika.team