Eight McGill trainees travelled to Edmonton, Alberta, last month to compete in the natHACKS 2024 hackathon, supported by the NeuroSphere Neurotech Hackathon Challenge Award competition, which offered graduate students a stipend to attend the hackathon in person. Canada’s largest neurotechnology hackathon with a $30,000 prize pool, natHACKS is a dynamic event that featured workshops, challenges and networking opportunities, culminating in an intense 64-hour hackathon. Participants competed in one of three streams (Recreation, Rehabilitation or Research), working in interdisciplinary teams matched by NeurAlbertaTech, the event organizer.
Meet the NeuroSphere Neurotech Hackathon Challenge Award winners:
- Abhay Parmar
- Jinani Sooriyaarachchi
- Ian Goodall Halliwell
- Xiaoxuan Lei
- Hildelith Leyser
- Veronika Pak
- Tamires Marçal
- Zinjing Wu
Congratulations to the NeuroMedix team, led by McGill trainees Abhay Parmar and Veronika Pak, for securing the second place in natHACKS 2024's Problem Provider division. Their groundbreaking project adapted the Natural Product-oriented Variational Autoencoder (NP-VAE) machine-learning model for Alzheimer’s Disease (AD), creating a prototype specifically for AD drug discovery.
