I keep ending up at biotech hackathons, running a team of four or five and doing the parts nobody volunteers for — scoping the idea down to something buildable, team logistics, sponsor coordination. Each of these shipped as a working prototype before the clock ran out; the fun is in what the constraint forces you to cut.
Maize Yield Predictor · UGA-Bayer Hackathon (2025)
Maize yield prediction from genotypic and environmental data using a neural network. The interesting problem was not the model. It was that genotype and environment interact, so a model that ignores the interaction looks fine in aggregate and fails on exactly the fields you care about.
FlockWatch, a bird migration tracker · HATCH (2025, 8 hours)
An interactive map for real-time bird tracking built on eBird API data, at HATCH, HudsonAlpha’s biotech hackathon.
Astronaut Diet Planner · HATCH (2024, 28 hours)
A plant-based diet planning system for space missions, built with Snakemake, the OpenAI API, and Streamlit. It joins nutritional databases to LLM-generated meal recommendations, with the pipeline handling the constraint-satisfaction part so the model only writes the menu.