Bio-Hackathon MENA 2023

The organizing committee listed below brings you the Bio-Hackathon Middle East and North Africa (MENA) 2023 for bioinformatics experts. This will be a great opportunity to collaborate with researchers and field professionals. We encourage women to participate.

Organizing Committee

  • The Bio-Ontologies Research Group (BORG)  (KAUST, Saudi Arabia)
  • Computational Bioscience Research Center (CBRC) (KAUST, Saudi Arabia)
  • Women to Impact (WTI) team (KAUST, Saudi Arabia)
  • Prof. Dr. Michel Dumontier (Maastricht University, the Netherlands)
  • Dr. Leyla Jael Garcia Castro (ZB MED, Germany)
  • Dr. Toshiyaki Katayama (DBCLS, Japan)
  • Dr. Mona Alshahrani (SDAIA, Saudi Arabia)
  • Mr. Nagarajan Kathiresan (Supercomputing, KAUST, Saudi Arabia)

Bio-Hackathon events involve a large number of people that meet on-site to discuss ideas and implement projects in a collaborative manner during intensive coding sessions.

The Bio-Hackathon-MENA Objectives

  • Stimulate and strengthen the synergy in the bioinformatics community within the MENA region and beyond.
  • Engage women in the bioinformatics field inside and outside the MENA region to work together on topics of common interest.
  • Facilitate the development of open-source bioinformatics tools and new methods for biomedical data analysis to accelerate scientific innovations and discoveries.

Outcomes of the Bio-Hackathon-MENA

  • Bioinformatics workflows, scripts, software, and resources developed during the event will be added to public repositories such as GitHub.
  • The selected projects will be invited to submit their manuscripts to the Journal of BioMedical Semantics (JBMS) for peer-reviewing. The pre-print versions of the manuscripts will be published in BioHackrXiv 

Bio-Hackathon Topics

Topics for this years Bio-Hackathon are listed below. Submitted projects that have a clear link to MENA interests will be prioritized for inclusion.

  • Data and text mining (with focus on Middle East)
  • Interoperable resources, databases, ontologies (with focus on Middle East)
  • Reproducible workflows for data analysis and interpretation (with focus on Middle East)
  • Bioinformatics software
  • Machine learning and AI methods