Eligibility

  • Participants must be undergraduate, postgraduate taught, postgraduate research students, postdocs, academic staff, or recent graduates (within the past year) from UK universities.

  • All participants must be 18 years or older.

  • Official volunteers are not eligible to participate as hackers.

  • All participants must be registered for the event and present in person during the hackathon.

Team Formation

  • Teams must consist of 4–6 participants.

  • Participants may apply as individuals or pre-formed teams.

  • Final team formation must be completed by the end of Day 1 (17:00, Friday 20 March).

  • We encourage interdisciplinary teams including: domain expert, AI engineer, bioinformatics/data scientist, and business/product/design roles.

Hackathon Period & Code Requirements

  • All core project work must be completed during the official BioHackathon period: 20–22 March 2026.

  • Substantial pre-written project code is not permitted.

  • Public frameworks, libraries, and standard tools are allowed.

  • Use of AI tools (e.g. ChatGPT, GitHub Copilot, LLM APIs) are permitted but must be clearly disclosed and credited in your submission.

  • Submissions that are simple wrappers around existing tools, without meaningful modification or added functionality, may be disqualified.

  • Judges will focus on what was built, designed, or meaningfully developed during the hackathon.

Project Submission

All submissions must include:

  • A public GitHub repository link (for any coding-based project)

  • A clear and detailed README (for coding-based projects)

  • Documentation of all frameworks, libraries, datasets, and AI tools used

  • A pitch deck (PowerPoint or equivalent slide format)

Submission deadline: 12:00 PM on Sunday 22 March 2026. Late submissions may not be considered for judging.

Code of Conduct

  • Participants are expected to maintain a professional, respectful, and inclusive environment.

  • Proper credit must be given for all external code, datasets, models, and tools.

  • Failure to credit external resources may result in disqualification.

  • No harassment or discrimination of any kind will be tolerated.

  • Follow all venue safety rules.

  • Full Code of Conduct: https://www.hackathons.org.uk/code-of-conduct/

Intellectual Property

  • This is a low-risk, exploratory event. Participants keep ownership of their ideas.

  • There is no obligation to form a company.

  • Outputs may include concepts, prototypes, or models.

  • By participating, you grant the BioHackathon organising team permission to share non-confidential project summaries, images, and outcomes for promotional purposes.

  • Participants are responsible for ensuring they do not disclose confidential or restricted datasets (e.g., any aspect of their PhD or postdoctoral research).

  • We strongly recommend attending the pre-hackathon IP workshop on 4 March to understand IP in the context of a biohackathon.

The organising team reserves the right to amend rules where necessary; any changes will be clearly communicated.