After scrolling through LinkedIn one day, Ryanne Mulligan, a graduate student in the University of Florida College of Pharmacy’s Department of Pharmacotherapy and Translational Research, stumbled across a post asking for applications to attend the St. Jude KIDS25 BioHackathon in Memphis, Tenn. Despite the intimidating first impression, she decided to seize the opportunity and attend the event as a chance to grow her software and website-building skills while working with a team to address real-world needs in a field she knows well.
“Before this event, I had very minimal experience in website building. I had played around with HTML and CSS previously, but didn’t realize how much further it went,” Mulligan said. “My group was so supportive and helpful, encouraging me to play around with the code and add my own components, slowly but surely.”
St. Jude describes the BioHackathon as an event where diverse, multidisciplinary participants gather, collaborate and build software-based solutions during a 72-hour span. Participants foster new relationships with community researchers and are encouraged to step out of their comfort zone to work on a passion project, something outside of their field entirely, or finally put the experimental method that’s been bouncing around in their head to the test.
“My best advice is don’t be afraid to try something new just because you think you aren’t good enough,” Mulligan said. “You absolutely have valuable skills to share, and experiences like this are the best way to grow them.”
When looking for a team to join, Mulligan says one project really stood out to her. Eric Dixon, a senior medical writer for St. Jude, submitted an idea to create a fun and engaging superhero comic book app for pediatric cancer patients to help them better understand CAR-T cell therapy, which Dixon describes as a promising treatment for children with relapsed or refractory leukemia and other cancers. Mulligan says Dixon had the ideas and writing skills for the project but didn’t have the knowledge needed to build a website.
“I am a Ph.D. student in a lab that works with clinical and omics data from pediatric leukemia patients,” Mulligan said. “I felt like this was my chance to finally have a direct impact on these kids beyond what I have seen on an Excel spreadsheet.”
Team roles for the project included storyboard writers, graphic designers/illustrators, front-end developers, pediatric oncology advisors, UX/UI designers and gamification specialists. Diving straight into her position and collaborating with her teammates, Mulligan says by the end she was notably able to animate various items while gathering an understanding of how website construction worked using Vue components.
“Something that really stood out to me was how supportive everyone was,” Mulligan said. “Even other teams I spoke to all said the same thing, that their teammates were hard working, had unique ideas and had no problem lending a hand to help their teammates along the way. I loved how excited everyone was to see each other’s progress. It created an environment where you felt motivated to keep pushing forward.”
Mulligan is mentored by Jatinder Lamba, Ph.D., associate dean for research and graduate education and a professor of pharmacotherapy and translational research in the UF College of Pharmacy.