BroadHacks

🎉 Thank you hackers for participating in BroadHacks 2026! 🎉

Congrats to our winners!

• BroadHacks 2026 Judge's Choice Awards:

  • Open Track: Team 7 - ProtoCopilot: A copilot for lab procedure videos

  • Tahoe Transcriptome Track: Team 2 - COMET: COmbinatorial Mapping to End-state Toxicity

• BroadHacks 2026 Broadie's Choice Award:
  Team 6 - Agentic Lab Management Solution​

See all BroadHacks 2026 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 25 - Friday June 26, 2026.

Monadnock, 415 Main Street

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:

• BroadHacks Judge's Choice Award: We want to see what problems or ideas matter to you, and the innovative ways you tackle them! Our judges will choose a favorite project both in the Open Track and in the Tahoe Transcriptome Track.

• 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!

Have questions or want to support the event?

Please reach out to the BroadHacks Steering Committee (broadhacks-sc@broadinstitute.org) if you have questions about participating or supporting the event!

• C. M. Williams (cmwilliams@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. 

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.

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 (broadhacks-sc@broadinstitute.org) 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!