News

The CRT is looking for suitable challenges that can be “hacked” by a team of genomics data scientists to generate innovative solutions.

If you or your organisation has a bioinformatics challenge or a biological problem that could be tackled in a biohackathon then please send it to us!

Our teams of PhD researchers have a good understanding of molecular biology, excellent experience of developing computational solutions for biological data and are well placed to work collaboratively and rapidly to develop and implement a solution to your challenge.

Biohackathon Goals:

• Provide students with the opportunity to apply their interdisciplinary expertise, experience and skills to “hack” solutions to real world challenges or practical research questions in a tight timeframe.
• Provide students with experience of working as a team on the type of challenge they might expect to encounter in a future work environment.
• Enable companies and organisations to understand the potential of our PhD researchers to work collaboratively and intensely to develop innovative solutions.

For Challenge proposers

This is intended as a 2-3 day training event for students, but it will allow you to take advantage of the students’ expertise, diversity of backgrounds, problem solving abilities and enthusiasm to think outside the box and possibly provide an innovative solution to your challenge. All our PhD students have expertise in genomics/data science/bioinformatics so challenges that require the development of bioinformatics workflows are particularly welcome. Teams will be composed of 5-6 PhD students and each team will work on a different challenge.

What’s required

1. A description of the challenge (max 1 page)
2. A challenge suitable for a team of 5-6 people working over 2 days to come up with a solution
3. The challenge proposer will need to brief the team and be accessible to the team (in-person or virtually) for short question and answer sessions during the event
4. Challenge proposers should be willing to provide feedback at the end of the 2 days to the team on their solution
5. If possible there should also be the possibility afterwards to finalise any tools (or outputs), to test and validate them with end-users, and to disseminate the results (e.g. the code and the data produced during the event could be made publicly available on GitHub)

Important notes:

1. Challenges should be tractable – not all biological problems are amenable to solution by biohackathons – the challenge/problem should be compatible with the hackathon format
2. The short time available for bio-hackathons generally only allows for the design and implementation of prototype solutions. For example, de novo software design is generally not the goal of hackathons but proof-of-concept implementations can fit the format quite well.
3. Challenge proposers must understand all the components that will be required in advance (software tools and hardware facilities, verification of the quality of any datasets to be used during the event).

To submit a challenge:

Please email your challenge (max 1 page) to include

• title
• background
• challenge
• vision
• tasks
• datasets
• any team requirements or limitations

to  genomicscrt@universityofgalway.ie before 30^th Sept 2024.

All challenges will be evaluated for suitability and a selection procedure may be implemented if we receive more challenges than we have teams.