BroadHacks

🎉 Thank you hackers for participating in BroadHacks 2025! 🎉

Congrats to our winners!

• BroadHacks 2025 ESM Award: Team 8 - Outsmarting Viral Escape With ESM3

• BroadHacks 2024 Judge's Choice Award: Team 3 - Boom Extractor

• BroadHacks 2024 Broadie's Choice Award: 

  • • 1st Prize: Team 3 - Boom Extractor

    • 2nd Prize: Team 6 - Science Delivers

    • 3rd Prize: Team 13 - Caramel Flan @ 177C

See all BroadHacks 2025 Project Submissions here!

See photos here!

Thank you to the Incredible Broadies who made BroadHacks possible

About

Broadies are eager innovators, learners, and collaborators. We have many original and potentially transformative ideas in bioinformatics, computational biology, and software engineering. However, our schedules are busy, and we find ourselves constrained by time and resources. BroadHacks aims to provide Broadies a unique opportunity to dive into our untapped ideas, explore new skills, and foster institute-wide collaborations with a 24-hour hackathon event. 

"24 hour" Hackathon Event

Thursday June 26 - Friday June 27, 2025.

300 Binney Street, Second Floor Space

Participants and mentors

• Anyone with a Broad affiliation and badge access.

• Anyone with expertise or want to learn computational biology, bioinformatics, and software engineering or expertise are welcome!

Projects

Anything in the realm of computational biology, bioinformatics, and software engineering! Consider this as an opportunity to level up your computational skills, learn about a different domain, work on something you have not had the time to yet, and connect with different Broadies. We will provide events to facilitate team building and honing in on particular goal or project.

Awards

We want to recognize the ideas and ingenuity that the hackers bring to the event and the computational research ecosystem at the Broad. We will have the following awards:

• ESM Creativity Award: Awarded to the team in the ESM Track with the most creative use of an ESM model! The winners of this prize will be awarded 6 months of additional compute for ESM.

• BroadHacks Best Overall Project: We want to see what problems or ideas matter to you, and the innovative ways you tackle them!

• People's Choice award: All Broadies are invited to the expo to see what Broadhacks teams have worked on and vote on their favorite project!

Note that teams may include remote Broadies, and that work on the submitted project may begin anytime prior to the official "24 hour" hackathon event. So if you already have a team or already made progress on an idea before June 27, your project is still eligible for awards!

Broadhacks Ideathon Wednesday June 11 (ft. RATalks)

Time: Tuesday June 11, 3-5pm

Location: Serengeti (6th Floor between 415M and 75A)

This is an event open to all Broadies to share ideas and problems relating to or could benefit from computational biology, bioinformatics, and software engineering. The event features speed-talks or "pitches" and an open mic session for anyone to step up and pitch, followed by time to mingle and discuss ideas and problems.

• Part 1: Small groups brainstorming, everyone workshops ideas.

• Part 2: Group pitches! Each group pitches one idea for a hackathon project (2 min pitch + 2 min Q&A)

• Part 3: Mingle with speakers and other audience members and hackathon participants

Why participate or attend?

• If you are participating in the Hackathon event, this is a great opportunity to find your team, pitch an idea you already have, and brainstorm a hackathon project!

• If you have ideas you would like Broadies participating in the hackathon to work on, this is also a great time to share, inspire, and collaborate!

Broadhacks Workshop Series June 16-25

These workshops are designed for all levels of computational experience, but with a specific focus towards complete beginners and non-computationalists for participation in the hackathon event. ALL Broadies are welcome to participate in any of these workshops, whether attending the hackathon event or not.

Workshop Schedule:

• June 16, 3:30-4:30pm, Introduction to Python (in partnership with Broad Computing Basics)

• June 18, 9:00-11:00am, Leveraging Piximi for Deep Learning on Images (in partnership with Imaging Platform)

• June 18, 2:00-3:00pm, Protein Structure Bioinformatics with the G2P portal (in partnership with the Iqbal Lab)

• June 25, 1:00-2:00pm, TxGemma: Agentic AI for Therapeutic Discovery (in partnership with Google)

Have questions or want to support the event?

Please reach out to the BroadHacks Steering Committee if you have questions about participating or supporting the event!

• Jordan Safer (jsafer@broadinstitute.org)

• C Williams (wcorinne@broadinstitute.org)

• Stanislav Bratchikov (sbratchi@broadinstitute.org)

• Thanh Long Nguyen (ngth@broadinstitute.org)

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: What is a hackathon? What will participants be working on?

Hackathons are opportunities for participants to learn,and/or collaborate on projects/ideas they want to explore that are either 

1.  completely out of their domain, or 

2.  solve a particular problem/idea they have already been thinking about but haven't had the time set aside to address it. 

We do not specify exactly what participants will work on besides being loosely in the realm of bioinformatics, computational biology, and software engineering. However, we are organizing talks, workshops, and team building events prior to the event to help participants identify ideas or problems that are interesting to them and form teams (2-4 people). We are also reaching out to different platforms across the Broad to propose or incentivize participants to work on projects using their datasets or products. More details will be available in April, and any suggestions or if you have suggestions on projects to work  on, please let us know in the registration form or by contacting one of the team members via email or slack!

Q: Is this event restricted to CAs and ACBs?

A: Not at all! The hackathon is for the Broad community, and is open to all with a Broad badge.

Q: I don't have prior experience programming, will I be able to participate?

There's no doubt that many hackathon projects will have a heavy coding component, however, every team will benefit from a collaboration between biologists and computationalists! During team matching, we will work to bring computational-minded and biology-minded folk together :) 

• There are many ways to get involved with BroadHacks

• Attend workshops and talks

• Pitch ideas and recruit CAs/software engineers to help

• Learn new computational skills!

Q: Do I need to pay for this event?

This event is free for Broadies to participate in! Food will be provided.

Q: I am not sure I will get permission from my manager or supervisor to participate in the full event. Can I partially participate? 

Ideally participants will be able to attend the full hackathon. If you plan to attend, we highly advise that you notify your supervisor or team as soon as possible to make appropriate arrangements. That said, we are working with Broad leadership so everyone will be allowed and encouraged to fully participate.

If you are interested in participating in this event, please fill out the registration form so we can take this information to Broad leadership!

Q: Do I need to take time off work to participate?

As an official Broad event, participating in this hackathon should NOT require you to take any vacation or PTO time. This is a great opportunity for you to level-up your skills, make connections, and explore new ideas in research. We highly encourage you to let your team know in advance that you plan to fully participate so you can plan accordingly. If you have concerns, please reach out or let us know when you register so we can coordinate.

Q:  Should we form a team in advance, or can we join as individuals?

You can form a team in advance, or join individually. Please make sure that all team members register if joining as a team. If you join individually, we will connect you with a team with shared goals and diverse skillsets from across the Broad!