guidelines

  1. Team Composition: Teams can consist of 1-4 individuals.

  2. Eligibility: Open to all undergraduate and graduate students, irrespective of their university's geographical location. Students must register with a valid @_.edu email address.

  3. Registration Fees: Participation is free of charge.

  4. Event Duration: The hackathon will start at 8am on Saturday, March 2, and end at 5pm on Sunday, March 3.

  5. Focus of Solutions: Each team's project should aim to meet the needs of one of the patient organizations listed on our page.

  6. Scope Definition: Part of the challenge involves defining the scope of your solution – see below for some guidelines. We encourage teams to start this process prior to the event.

  7. Expert Support: Doctors, statisticians, and biomedical scientists will be available for office hours on-site and/or via Zoom for drop-in sessions. This is to assist teams with inquiries about specific diseases or computational methods during the event.

  8. Research Integrity: All research norms must be strictly followed. Any previously published research used in your final deliverable must be appropriately cited. Participants are welcome to use any public datasets and we will give directions to some useful ones (see blog). Personally solicited or yet-to-be-published private data not provided by hackathon organizers should not be used or presented at any point in the deliverable.

CHALLENGES

A weekend is not long, but you can get much done with a focused strategy.
Your final deliverable must be crafted with three demonstrable, deliberate choices:

1

Target the needs of one of the rare disease patient groups we have partnered with in this hackathon.

A data-based report of correlated genomic biomarkers, to expedite the work of scientists studying potentially druggable events for Adenylyl cyclase 5 (ADCY5)‐related movement disorder.

A community-building web-app to find the missing Charcot Marie Tooth disease type 4J (CMT4J) patients – a Broad Institute aggregate frequency analysis estimates that there should be 6,000 patients globally with CMT4J, but only 100 have been diagnosed so far. A platform which addresses the under/misdiagnosis of CMT4J patients, who tend to be more globally dispersed, and effectively facilitates clinical trial enrollment will greatly expedite the process of finding a cure.

2

Cater to either the lives of patients and caregivers, or the work of doctors and scientists.

3

Take the form of a data-report, GitHub-based tool, or a web/mobile application with front-end interactivity.

Examples

  • March 2, Saturday

    • 8am – 9am, Breakfast and briefing

    • 9am – 9.30am, Opening keynote address (Dr. Timothy Yu)

      Work session

    • 12pm – 1pm, Lunch and lightning talks from patients, caregivers, and scientists

      Work session

    • 3pm – 5pm, Office hours with scientists and doctors

      Work session

    • 7pm – 8pm, Dinner

      Work session

    • 11pm – 12am, Brain Break

      Work session

    March 3, Sunday

    • 8am – 9am, Breakfast and briefing

    • 9am – 9.30am, Pitch demo

      Work session

    • 11am – 12pm, Office hours with scientists and doctors

    • 12pm – 1pm, Lunch

      Submissions due at 1.55pm

    • 2pm – 3pm, Final presentations

    • 3pm – 4pm, Teatime, flash networking, and deliberations

    • 4pm – 4.30pm, Closing keynote address (Speaker: Dr. Monica Hsiung Wojcik)

    • 4.30pm – 5pm, Prize-presentation and conclusion

  • Grand prize: $1,000

    Second place: $500