Hackathon for Health Equity Sparks Student Interest in Epidemiology.
Hackathon for Health Equity Sparks Student Interest in Epidemiology
Guided by SPH mentors, multidisciplinary teams of undergraduate, master’s, and doctoral students from universities across the country analyzed national high school survey data to answer original research questions about teen health.
More than 40 undergraduate, master’s, and doctoral students from across the country participated the Hackathon for Health Equity hosted by the Department of Epidemiology in partnership with the Center for Health Data Science and BU’s Hariri Institute for Computing on February 28.
The day-long virtual event was the third in a series of hackathons—and the first fully online—prompting students from a variety of academic backgrounds to apply quantitative research methods to investigate systemic health disparities. The only requirement for registration was the prior completion of an introductory statistics or programming course.
Under the mentorship of faculty, staff, and doctoral students at the School of Public Health, participants used the statistical programming language R to analyze data from the Youth Risk Behavioral Surveillance System (YRBSS), a set of national surveys that track the health behaviors of U.S. high school students.
Emily Goldmann, clinical associate professor of epidemiology, spearheaded coordination of the day’s activities, which commenced with a short orientation on the basics of epidemiology followed by more than five hours of dedicated work in breakout rooms for students to familiarize themselves with the YRBSS dataset and collaborate in groups on a research question of their choice. The day concluded with presentations and feedback from a panel of judges.
“Public health is an interdisciplinary field, so we got this idea that we could drive interest in a public health career among people in adjacent, data-focused fields who may not have considered it before,” says Goldmann of the motivation behind hosting the hackathon.
“We love epidemiology, and we think lots of other people would as well, if only they knew about it,” says Maria Glymour, chair and professor of epidemiology, who served as a mentor during event.
While the previous two hackathons were held in-person on the Charles River Campus and restricted to undergraduates, Goldmann and Glymour transitioned to the online format to open participation to larger and more diverse pool of interested students. Then, in forming the groups, they purposefully mixed undergraduates and graduates, so participants could learn from one another’s different skills.
Judging by the quality of the final presentations, the approach worked, Goldmann says. “I was especially impressed with their discussion of limitations. I think people really benefited from having some folks from MPH and PhDs programs in their group to think about potential biases. One group even used a machine learning model to validate the output of the standard statistical model we encouraged folks to use. I wasn’t expecting that at all, and it was absolutely welcome.”
Goldmann was also pleased to see that many of the groups employed directed acyclical graphs (DAGs) to map causal relationships between their variables. The DAGs demonstrated to her that the students were carefully thinking through their analysis step-by-step and considering how confounding factors and other sources of bias may have influenced their health outcome of interest, she says.
For example, one group investigated the relationship between unstable housing and suicidal ideation, and when they found that adolescents facing unstable housing were nearly twice as likely to seriously have considered suicide in the past year than their peers with stable homes, they explored whether physical activity, academic performance, and the social media habits modified that risk. Their findings showed that these factors did not meaningfully alter risk of suicidal thoughts, leading the students to emphasize in their conclusion how fundamental housing stability is to mental health.
Manali Sanghai, an MPH student at SPH and a member of that group, reflected on her experience in a LinkedIn post following the hackathon. “It’s sobering to see how housing instability, something so basic, can ripple into mental health challenges,” she wrote. “This isn’t just data, it’s real lives at risk and it reminds us why public health interventions must go beyond treatment to tackle structural inequities.”
Jiaxin Su, Tony Roberts, Nance Cunningham, Diviya Murugesan, Neetha Reddy Chinthireddy, and Martin Ho were named the winners of the 2026 Hackathon for Health Equity for their presentation “Connect for Mental Health” on the association between feelings of closeness to others at school and suicidal ideation.
