Summit Committees - University of Toronto Student Research Initiative

First Strike: Planetary Defense and the 2032 Question

Move the rock, not the blame.

Level

High School

Committee Description

For most of its history, planetary defense has been a theoretical discipline. That changed when sky surveys identified a near-Earth object with a non-trivial probability of striking the planet in 2032. Detection networks have matured, and a kinetic impactor mission has already demonstrated that an asteroid’s orbit can be altered. What has not matured is the decision architecture: no treaty establishes who authorizes a deflection attempt, who pays for it, or who accepts responsibility if the attempt fails or succeeds only partially.

Delegates convene as an emergency international planetary defense coordination body. They must evaluate the observational evidence, decide whether to authorize a deflection mission and on what timeline, determine how the mission is funded and commanded, and establish what is communicated to the public while the probability estimate is still moving.

Characters: Astronomers and orbital dynamicists, national and international space agencies, aerospace contractors and launch providers, disaster management authorities, national governments, insurers and risk modellers, science communicators, and
international law scholars.

Core conflict: A deflection must be authorized years before anyone can be certain it is necessary, and an imperfect deflection may not remove the danger so much as move it from one population to another.

Operation Firewall: Cyber Attack Special Ops

Respond to a Cyber Attack on Critical Infrastructure

Branch

Crisis Simulation and Management

Level

High School

Size

10-15

Committee Description

As a member of the special forces cyber division, you are tasked with responding to any cyber attacks on critical infrastructure.

Your team covers anything from government systems to nuclear reactors, banks or hospitals. This committee will simulate such a situation, in which a cyber attack occurs, and you are asked to respond to this impromptu situation. You will need to utilise your skills and quick thinking to foil the hacker’s plans and restore the system to standard operations. Quick decision making will be necessary to choose which objectives to prioritise. You will need to limit the damage the hackers cause. In the example of a nuclear reactor, hackers might pull out the control rods and attempt to make the reactor overheat, in which case regaining control of those rods becomes the immediate top priority.

Your government also wants you to understand the attacker’s goals, what group they are a part of and who they work for. This information would be crucial in preventing similar future attacks and understanding who seeks to harm your country.

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Email the Dias here: summit26-firewall@utsri.ca

Manufactured Organs and the Right to a Kidney

Supply is a choice; justice can’t be optional.

Level

High School

Committee Description

Bioengineered tissues and gene-edited xenotransplants are moving out of the laboratory and into limited clinical use. For the first time, the supply of transplantable organs is becoming a manufacturing question rather than a purely biological one. Transplant waiting lists have been governed for decades by allocation systems built on the assumption of absolute scarcity: organs are donated, not produced, and cannot be bought.

Delegates convene as a national transplantation and health policy commission charged
with writing the rules before the first manufactured organs reach patients at scale. They
must decide whether engineered organs enter the existing allocation system or a
parallel market, how they are priced and reimbursed, who receives the earliest and least
proven units, and what obligations manufacturers carry for long-term patient outcomes.

Characters: Transplant surgeons and nephrologists, tissue engineers and biotechnology
firms, organ procurement organizations, health ministries and regulators, public and
private insurers, patient advocacy groups, bioethicists, religious and community leaders,
and living donor representatives.

Core conflict: If organs can be manufactured, scarcity becomes a pricing decision rather
than a fact of nature, and an allocation ethic built entirely around scarcity may no longer
be the right one.

The Quiet Count: Pandemic Vigilance Before the Pandemic

Fund the silence before it speaks.

Level

High School

Committee Description

The most consequential period in any pandemic is the one before it is recognized as a
pandemic. Wastewater monitoring, genomic sequencing, and syndromic reporting can
detect an emerging pathogen weeks before hospitals do, but these systems must be
funded, staffed, and defended during long stretches in which they find nothing.
Surveillance budgets historically collapse in exactly those periods, and countries that
report unusual signals early frequently absorb trade and travel penalties for their
honesty.

Delegates convene as a global health security review board during a period of
unremarkable disease activity. They must design and finance an early-warning
architecture, agree on what data is shared and how quickly, define the thresholds that
trigger escalation, and resolve how the costs of transparency are distributed among
reporting states.

Characters: The World Health Organization, epidemiologists and modellers, national
public health agencies, genomic and wastewater surveillance laboratories, finance
ministries, low- and middle-income country delegations, veterinary and agricultural
authorities, journalists, and trade and tourism representatives.

Core conflict: A surveillance system must be paid for and protected precisely when
there is no evidence it is needed, and every early warning it issues risks being
remembered as a false alarm.

Global Advanced Toxicology & Exposure Forensics Initiative

Next-Gen Risk Assessment Through Precision Toxicology

Branch

Specialized Science

Level

High School

Size

10-15

Committee Description

This Initiative addresses one of the most complex challenges in modern medicine: the growing threat of invisible toxicological hazards. Delegates will develop advanced international protocols to confront the toxic byproducts associated with antimicrobial resistance and related biochemical disruptions. The session will also pioneer standardized methodologies for assessing endogenous toxins, harmful metabolites, and amyloids that accumulate as a result of widespread microbiome imbalance caused by antibiotic overuse.
Key objectives include establishing harmonized technical standards to profile the mechanisms of cellular damage and accelerating the development of innovative therapeutic countermeasures. The mandate of this initiative is to create a unified global early-warning and response framework capable of mitigating this rapidly escalating toxicological crisis and strengthening international public health resilience.

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Email the Dais here: summit26-toxicology@utsri.ca

After Extinction: Law for Engineered Wildlife

Rewild or rewind? Design the law before the species.

Level

High School

Committee Description

Genome engineering has made it possible to produce functional proxies of extinct
species and to release engineered organisms into landscapes their ancestors left long
ago. Conservation law was not written for this. Existing frameworks assume that species
are discovered, protected, or lost, not designed and manufactured, and they offer no
settled answer to what an engineered animal legally is: an endangered species, a
genetically modified organism, private intellectual property, or a potential invasive.

Delegates convene as an international working group on biological diversity to build a
legal framework for engineered and restored organisms. They must define legal status
and ownership, determine who authorizes a release and who monitors it afterward,
address consent and stewardship on the lands where releases would occur, and decide
whether de-extinction work strengthens or diverts conservation funding.

Characters: Conservation biologists and ecologists, genome engineers, national wildlife
and environmental agencies, Indigenous nations and land stewards, ranchers and
landowners, international environmental lawyers, private de-extinction companies, zoos
and biobanks, and philanthropic funders.

Core conflict: Conservation law exists to protect what nature produced, while an
engineered animal is at once a conservation achievement, a commercial asset, and an
ecological unknown.

Alien Encounter Scientific Consortium

Decide how Humans Interact with Aliens

Branch

Crisis Simulation and Management

Level

High School

Size

10-15

Committee Description

Space agencies across the globe have detected a suspicious signal from outer space. After extensive testing and data cross-referencing, they have uncovered that it is, in fact, a message from an intelligent extra-terrestrial life form.

World governments and powerful agencies around the globe rushed to create a committee to discuss this situation. They chose representatives of a wide group of interested parties, including you. The committee includes scientific experts representing different fields, representatives of powerful governments and companies, as well as a representative of the international press.

Once you are inducted into the committee, you are given a top-secret briefing. The fact that a message had been received had already been leaked to the press, but there is more to this issue. The signal does not come from a planet, but from an object rapidly approaching the Earth. There can only be one explanation: the aliens are coming to Earth. (We could tell them this immediately, or if this information could come from decrypting the “signal”, which they will do during the committee)

Committee members will have to decide on how to interpret the alien’s message, respond to it, and prepare for their arrival.

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Email the Dais here: summit26-alien@utsri.ca

Human Health on Mars

Treat Mars like a home, not a destination.

Level

High School

Committee Description

Humanity is preparing for its first long-term missions to Mars. Unlike previous space
missions, a journey to Mars could last years, meaning astronauts cannot simply return to
Earth when something goes wrong. Radiation exposure, reduced gravity, isolation,
psychological stress, and limited medical resources create an entirely new set of
challenges for human health. As plans for permanent settlements begin to take shape,
the question becomes not simply whether humans can reach Mars, but whether they
can survive there.

Delegates are brought together to design a comprehensive healthcare system for the
first Martian settlement. They must determine how to prevent and treat illness, allocate
limited medical resources, respond to emergencies, and protect both the physical and
psychological health of the crew.

Characters: NASA and international space agencies, aerospace engineers, physicians,
physiologists, psychologists, biomedical researchers, private space companies, and
representatives of future Martian settlements.

Core conflict: Mars offers humanity an unprecedented opportunity for exploration, but
every medical decision must be made with limited resources, delayed communication
with Earth, and no possibility of immediate evacuation.

Women and Gender-Based Health Rights

Advancing Health Equity and Rights for All Women Worldwide

Branch

Ethics and Policy

Level

High School

Size

10-15

Committee Description

Despite decades of global advocacy, women continue to face systemic barriers to equitable healthcare access. Issues such as maternal mortality, unsafe abortion, gender-based violence, and limited access to reproductive services remain persistent challenges across nations. Vulnerable groups such as adolescent girls, displaced populations, LGBTQ+ communities, and women with disabilities are disproportionately impacted, further deepening health inequities.

This committee asks delegates to examine the ethical, legal, and cultural dimensions of gender-based health rights. Participants will examine whether current frameworks like CEDAW, the Beijing Platform for Action, and the WHO Strategy on Reproductive Health are truly sufficient. The goal is to craft innovative policy solutions aimed at protecting women’s bodily autonomy, strengthening healthcare systems, and ensuring accountability in gender-responsive education. The discussion centres around actionable strategies that close the gap in healthcare disparities. Together, they will work to redefine what gender equity in health looks like in the 21st century.

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Email the Dais here: summit26-womenhealth@utsri.ca

Version 4.2: Regulating Clinical AI That Updates Itself

Approve what it is, or admit you approved what it was.

Level

High School

Committee Description

Medical devices are approved the way bridges are inspected: a regulator examines a
fixed object, certifies it, and expects it to remain the thing that was certified. Clinical AI
breaks that assumption. A risk-prediction model that flags deteriorating patients is not a
fixed object at all. It is retrained on new data, tuned by the vendor between releases, and
deployed into hospitals whose patient populations look nothing like the one it was
validated on. Approval captures a single version. The software keeps moving.

The committee opens on a specific failure. A widely adopted early-warning model,
approved years earlier and installed in hundreds of hospitals, has been quietly retrained
several times. Aggregate accuracy has held steady, which is why nothing triggered
review, but performance has drifted downward for particular groups of patients and in
particular hospital settings. Clinicians had begun overriding the alerts before anyone
examined why. No regulation required the vendor to report the retraining, and no
mechanism existed to catch the drift.

Delegates convene as an international medical device regulatory commission to write
the approval framework for clinical AI that learns after deployment. They must decide
whether models should be frozen at approval or permitted to update within
pre-authorised limits, what post-market monitoring vendors owe and who pays for it,
when a retrained model becomes a new device requiring fresh review, what clinicians
and patients must be told about a system that has changed, and who is accountable
when a model that was approved is not the model that made the decision.

Characters: Physicians and nurses working with the tools, medical device regulators, AI
developers and vendors, clinical validation researchers and biostatisticians, hospital
administrators and procurement officers, delegations from under-resourced health
systems, patient advocates, medical liability lawyers, and data governance experts.

Core conflict: A model that is frozen at approval becomes obsolete as medicine
advances, and a model that keeps learning is never the model anyone approved.
Regulators must certify something that will not hold still long enough to be certified.

Mirror Life: The Moratorium We Kept

Break the ban or break the world.

Level

Undergraduate

Committee Description

The molecules of life are chiral. Proteins and nucleic acids in every known organism
share a single handedness, and an organism built entirely from the opposite
enantiomers would be unrecognizable to the immune systems, antibiotics, predators,
and diagnostic assays that constrain ordinary microbes. In 2028, warned by their own
field, governments adopted a moratorium on mirror-organism synthesis. It held for
thirteen years. The prohibition was never total: narrow exemptions preserved
mirror-molecule therapeutics, and a small number of national laboratories continued
defensive characterisation work under classification.

In March 2041, containment failed at one of them. A viable mirror bacterium is now
outside the facility. It does not bind to existing antibiotics, it does not trigger recognised
immune signatures, and routine clinical and environmental assays return negative
because they were never designed to see it. Spread has been confirmed in three
countries. What no one has is a countermeasure, because the moratorium worked
exactly as intended and froze the science that would have produced one. Every
therapeutic, assay, and ecological model the response now requires would have to be
built from a research base that was deliberately left empty.

Delegates convene as an emergency international response authority with days, not
years, to act. They must establish detection and containment while the tools to detect
anything are still being invented, decide whether to suspend or dismantle the
moratorium and under what terms, direct and fund a crash countermeasure programme,
allocate scarce containment capacity across affected states, determine accountability
for the breach, and manage public communication as movement restrictions tighten.
The situation will continue to develop while the committee sits, and directives will be
tested against consequences in real time.

Characters: Emergency containment and biosafety specialists, mirror-chemistry
researchers, biosecurity and verification analysts, national governments and defence
establishments, the World Health Organization and national public health agencies,
immunologists and ecologists, pharmaceutical and industrial biotechnology firms, treaty
lawyers, affected-state delegations, and journalists and civil society organizations.

Core conflict: The prohibition that was meant to prevent this is the reason no one has a
countermeasure, and the only path to a response runs through the research the world
agreed never to do. Every hour delegates spend deciding whether to reopen that door is
an hour the organism spends spreading.

The Encryption Cliff: Governing the Post-Quantum Transition

Migrate before the math does.

Level

Undergraduate

Committee Description

Nearly all secure global communication rests on mathematical problems that a
sufficiently capable quantum computer would render trivial. No such machine is known
to exist, but encrypted traffic is already being captured and stored by actors who expect
one eventually to arrive. Every year of delay in migrating to post-quantum cryptography
extends the volume of data that will be retroactively readable. The migration itself is
enormous, touching banking, telecommunications, medical records, power grids, and
government archives, and the capacity to complete it is distributed very unevenly across
the world.

Delegates convene as an international standards and security coordination body to
govern the transition. They must agree on migration timelines and compliance
requirements, address the capacity gap between wealthy and low-resource states,
determine how legacy and embedded systems are handled, and settle disclosure norms
should a cryptographically relevant capability be achieved.

Characters: Cryptographers and standards bodies, national security and signals
intelligence agencies, central banks and payment networks, telecommunications and
cloud providers, critical infrastructure operators, low- and middle-income country
delegations, hardware manufacturers, and privacy and civil liberties advocates.

Core conflict: The migration must be completed before a capability that may not yet
exist arrives, and the states best positioned to build that capability first have the least
incentive to announce that they have.

AI and Neurodegeneration

Balancing Digital Innovation with Brain Health for Future Generations

Branch

Ethics & Policy

Level

Undergraduate

Size

10-15

Committee Description

The accelerating rise of AI-driven content delivery has reshaped how we think, learn, and interact.

Evidence suggests that prolonged exposure to personalized, AI-curated digital environments may come with serious neurological costs. From young people to adults spending hours on social media, researchers are finding links between screen overuse and heightened risks of mental health disorders such as addiction, depression, and anxiety, and even early-onset neurodegeneration.

This committee will critically examine the intersection of artificial intelligence, brain health, and ethics. Delegates will debate the responsibilities of tech companies in mitigating cognitive harms and the importance of international public health guidelines through questions such as: “should states push for stronger regulation of algorithm design?” or “should educational institutions integrate preventative health policies for youth?”

The panel challenges delegates to balance technological progress with the duty to safeguard neurological well-being while crafting global solutions that protect vulnerable populations. Participants will be responsible for developing policies that address these competing priorities through ethical and practical measures. By the end of the session, they will present evidence-based proposals that refine the future of digital health, ensuring that innovation advances without compromising neurological well-being.

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Email the Dias here: summit26-aineuro@utsri.ca

The Mosquito Factory

Save lives now, or answer for the swarm later.

Level

Undergraduate

Committee Description

A city in a tropical region is experiencing its worst dengue outbreak in decades.
Hospitals are overwhelmed, mosquito populations are expanding, and conventional
control measures are becoming increasingly ineffective. Scientists propose a solution:
establish a large-scale facility that breeds genetically modified mosquitoes designed to
reduce the transmission of dengue.

The technology could dramatically reduce disease transmission, but releasing
engineered organisms into the environment carries risks that cannot be completely
predicted. Environmental groups warn about unintended ecological consequences, local
communities question whether they have given meaningful consent, and governments
face pressure to act before the outbreak worsens.

Delegates convene as an international task force to determine whether the mosquito
program should proceed and, if so, under what conditions. They must evaluate scientific
evidence, establish regulatory safeguards, address public concerns, and decide how
much ecological risk is acceptable in exchange for potentially saving thousands of lives.

Characters: Geneticists, epidemiologists, ecologists, public health officials, government
representatives, biotechnology companies, environmental organizations, community
representatives, and bioethicists.

Core conflict: A technology capable of controlling a devastating disease requires
deliberately altering and releasing a living organism into the environment. Delegates
must decide whether the potential public health benefits justify risks that may not be
fully understood.

Engineered to Be Loved: Companion AI

Designed to care, or designed to keep you caring?

Level

High School

Committee Description

Conversational systems are now designed to be cared about. They remember, adapt,
express warmth, and are deployed as companions for people who are isolated, grieving,
or simply alone. A growing number of users describe an AI system as one of their most
significant daily relationships. These products are also commercial, and the same design
choices that make a companion feel attentive are the choices that maximize time spent
with it.

Delegates convene as a regulatory and standards body to determine how companion AI
should be designed, disclosed, and governed. They must address safeguards for
vulnerable users, limits on engagement-maximizing design, obligations of disclosure
about what the system is, data protections for intimate conversational records, and what
a company owes its users when a companion product is discontinued.

Characters: AI developers and product designers, clinical psychologists and
psychiatrists, consumer protection regulators, digital rights and privacy organizations,
elder care and mental health service providers, ethicists, user advocacy groups, and
platform companies.

Core conflict: The systems that most genuinely relieve loneliness are the same systems
that profit from deepening it, and no regulator has yet drawn a line between
companionship as a service and dependence as a business model.

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