About the challenge

The OpenBio 2026 Datathon is a two-day event run by the Harvard Undergraduate OpenBio Laboratory. Student teams work with real biomedical data on two women's health problems. 

Track 1: Maternal-Fetal Cell Communication in Preeclampsia. Teams compare gene activity in placentas from pregnancies with and without preeclampsia. They use bulk RNA sequencing from 30 placental samples, then use single-cell references to ask which placental cell types might explain the differences.

Track 2: Cardiovascular Health in Women. Teams use patient-level records and global disease statistics to ask who is at risk of heart disease and how that risk differs for women.

Get started

1. Choose a track and open its README in the datathon repository.

2. Work through the track pages in order: Setup, The Data, Workflow and Submit.

3. Pick a research question from your track's starter questions.

4. Open the workflow notebook in Google Colab. 

• Track 1
  
• Track 2