AbelsonTaylor – Danielle Jamil – April 7, 2020
https://www.abelsontaylor.com/blog/mit-hack/
The MIT COVID-19 Challenge came to life last weekend. The 48-hour virtual event hosted 1,500 hackers and created 238 teams to address COVID-19 challenges within 10 focus tracks. Participants came from over 96 countries and 49 states, each dealing with different stages of COVID-19 in their communities and made for a richly diverse array of proposed solutions.
Partners, sponsors and over 250 volunteer mentors worked the weekend to provide research and development resources to teams throughout. “The spirit of a healthcare hack is about democratizing innovation. We realize the potential of design thinking and distributive problem solving as a way to incite entrepreneurship. We want to help bring new approaches to some of the hardest human challenges.”, said Freddy Nguyen, MD, PHD, Co-Director MIT COVID-19 Challenge.
As a resident at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City, Freddy is on the front lines of the global health pandemic. With only 3 weeks to plan, he and co-organizers Alfonso Martinez, Stephanie MacConnell, Paul Cheek realized that there was a serious need to initiate a virtual hackathon to address the current crisis, and the idea for the MIT COVID-19 Challenge was born.
