The CRT Biohackathon took place at the University of Galway from 2nd– 4th Dec.
Our CRT PhD students aren’t just diving deep into academic research—they’re also stepping up work in teams to tackle real-world challenges! ️ Biohackathons provide a unique opportunity to push boundaries, collaborate with diverse teams, and create innovative solutions in a fast-paced environment.
The aim of organising a Biohackathon is to help students to develop skills beyond academia. Communication, rapid prototyping, teamwork, pitching ideas—these are skills that complement academic rigor and prepare students for industry and entrepreneurship. Meeting like-minded student innovators, and industry personnel who value problem-solving abilities and intellectual dept is a really valuable experience for students.
A huge thanks to the 5 companies that provided the challenges – they not only pitched the challenges but also took part in a careers session to answer questions on roles and careers Industry!
| Company | Challenge |
| Qualitas | Building a bioinformatics workflow to establish a catalogue of genomics variation in cattle. |
| Novogene | Terminal Transcript Analysis of PolyA Bulk RNA-Seq Data to Normalise and Mitigate Sample Variability |
| Eirna Bio | Advancing the RNome – the new OMICS frontier |
| Zinto Labs | Development of an automated pipeline for cyanobacteria detection through eDNA 16S sequencing |
| DNA Nexus | Create an easy-to-use variant annotation tool for clinical applications |
Well done to our 5 student teams who spent an intense 3 days tackling the challenges. Great progress was made by all the teams but there could only be one winner so a big thanks to our 3 judges who had a difficult task to decide on the winning team!
- Aaron Golden (VP Research University of Galway)
- Arnaud Autret (Head of European Operations, Illumina Ventures)
- Noor Kherreh (Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Galway)
The winning team was team Zinto Labs!
They went far beyond what was asked and presented a fantastic solution that really impressed the Judges and all the other teams! Well done to
Aideen McCabe- Micheal O’Dalaigh
- John Scanlan
- Harrison Anthony
Overall it was a fantastic event and much appreciated by the students and the challengers. It demonstrates the power of combining deep research knowledge with team based problem solving to think outside the box and come up with creative and innovative solutions to real world problems.