IOB Students Place Second at HATCH 2025

IOB Students Win Second Place at HATCH 2025!

This March, eight IOB graduate students competed in the the Hudson Alpha Tech Challenge (HATCH) in Huntsville, AL. HATCH is a yearly hackathon competition hosted by the biotech company Hudson Alpha to promote computational innovations for the life sciences.  One team of IOB students consisting of Nathan Gravel, Darrian Roy Talamantes, Parnian Rahimi, and Leandro Alama won second place in the professional/college category for their creation of Maize Watch, a machine learning model which could identify and differentiate several common diseases of maize from leaf photographs and pinpoint the disease hotspots on the leaf. The team developed, trained, and deployed their model in just one day. Congratulations to Nathan, Darrian, Parnian, and Leandro!