The St. Jude KIDS25 (Knowledge in Data Science) BioHackathon will be held from September 29 to October 1, 2025
If you are interested in leading a team in tackling one of the submitted challenges or any other interesting computational problems, please fill out our project proposal form.
If you are interested in participating or have any questions, please email us at biohackathon@stjude.org.
Explore past St. Jude Biohackathon teams and the innovative projects they created.
What is a hackathon?
An event where diverse, multidisciplinary participants gather, collaborate, and build software-based solutions that address real-world needs during a 48-72-hour span. Hackathons foster new relationships among community researchers, encouraging the sharing of knowledge and ideas. Participants are provided the opportunity to flex their creative muscles while building solutions that address existing challenges – often acquiring new skills in the process.
Why participate in a Hackathon?
Spark Collaboration
Meet and collaborate with St. Jude bioinformaticists, computational biologists, biostatisticians, imaging experts, data scientists, software engineers, and more. St. Jude has well over 200 employees with computational job titles across nearly all departments. The Hackathon is an opportunity to work directly with a diverse team on an exciting project to help solve problems proposed by the research community.
Learn and Expand your Skills
Hackathons provide an excellent opportunity to learn new skills, technologies, and methods. Learn from your teammates and other teams, be recognized for your skills, and identify local experts for a given method, technology, or framework.
Build Something
Step out of your comfort zone to work on a passion project, something outside your field entirely, or finally put that experimental method that's been bouncing around your head for months to the test. Hackathons are a rare environment in that failure is an acceptable outcome so long as useful knowledge is gained.
KIDS25 Biohackathon Planning Committee
Gang Wu
Director, Center for Applied Bioinformatics, St. Jude Children's Research Hospital
Susanna Downing Bioinformatics Research Scientist, Center for Pediatric Neurological Disease Research, St. Jude Children's Research Hospital
Jared Andrews Senior Bioinformatics Research Scientist, Department of Developmental Neurobiology, St. Jude Children's Research Hospital
Karol Szlachta Lead Computational Research Scientist, Center for Applied Bioinformatics, St. Jude Children's Research Hospital
Xun Zhu Manager, Software Engineering, Center for Applied Bioinformatics, St. Jude Children's Research Hospital
Stanley Pounds Member, St. Jude Faculty / Director of Biostatistics Courses, St. Jude Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences, St. Jude Children's Research Hospital
Julie Waits Director, Operations, Office of Data Science, St. Jude Children's Research Hospital
Ariel Maclin Program Coordinator, Office of Data Science, St. Jude Children's Research Hospital
