U-HackMed

The U-HackMed initiative was first launched in 2018 as a biomedical hackathon by the Lyda Hill Department of Bioinformatics. The program aimed to bring together bioinformaticians and clinicians for solving complex biomedical data problems using computational biology, which was a huge success and led to another biomedical hackathon event in 2019. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the program was re-configured as a virtual Gap Year for 2020 when students from across the nation formed teams and worked together on specific biomedical big data analysis problems. After a hiatus in 2021, we launched the U-HackMed NeuroChats global Journal Club. This initiative was jointly sponsored by the Peter O’Donnell Jr. Brain Institute and the Lyda Hill Department of Bioinformatics at UT Southwestern. All computational resources and support for our U-HackMed projects is provided by our on-site infrastructure BioHPC team. Read more about our sponsors, resources, and programs below.

• Lyda Hill Department of Bioinformatics

  The Lyda Hill Department of Bioinformatics was established in 2015 as a Computer Science department embedded in one of the world’s premier academic medical centers; UT Southwestern. The Department is home to a hybrid faculty of computational and experimental scientists, a graduate program in Computational Biology, and the BioHPC, one of the state’s largest academic high performance compute systems. 

• BioHPC

  The BioHPC is an infrastructure resource established within the Lyda Hill Department of Bioinformatics at UT Southwestern. The team provides and maintains high-performance computing, storage and client systems for the UTSW research community.

• Postdoctoral Affairs Office

  UT Southwestern offers excellent resources and support for postdoctoral scholars. With a dedicated Postdoctoral Affairs Office, an established roadmap, and programs that integrate into all Departments and Centers, our postdocs progress with great professional outcomes. 

• Graduate Programs

  The Biomedical Engineering Graduate Program at UTSW focuses on the development of advanced and interdisciplinary technologies that facilitate both basic biomedical research and the detection, diagnosis, and treatment of disease and disability. This program in includes a Computational Biology Track that is designed to teach how to leverage mathematical and computational approaches for understanding biological and chemical processes. This fosters student research collaborations between basic scientists, informaticians, and clinicians.