# ai x bio hackathon
AI x Bio Hackathon
A one-day hackathon on Ginkgo Bioworks' Perturb-seq data, part of Boston Tech Week 2026.
In May 2026 I spent a day at the AI x Bio Hackathon in Boston's Seaport District, part of the inaugural Boston Tech Week: a one-day event co-hosted by Ginkgo Bioworks and Absentia Labs for AI engineers, computational biologists, and clinicians working at the frontier of life sciences.
Our team worked with Ginkgo's VCPI Drug-seq dataset, a Perturb-seq-style resource, exploring how it could be used to move toward virtual cell models: simulating how a cell responds to a perturbation instead of running the experiment. It was a fast day of coding and exploring the data with Mehrnoosh Emamifar, Zhiyun Gong, Snehal Sambare, Rohan Arya Gondi, and Igor Novikov, and our team's submissions placed 3rd, 4th, and 7th.
A tiny step closer to building a virtual cell.