Hi there, my name is Karmen and I’m one of the organisers of the first HealthHack event in Canberra this year. But, my first encounter with HealthHack happened in Brisbane one year ago when I ended up participating as a problem owner, all thanks to Mitch Stanton-Cook…
At the time, I was a postdoc at the University of Queensland, working as a computational chemist on modelling membrane transport proteins. Many of these proteins are important drug targets and computational simulations provide a very detailed insights of the molecular motion and interactions with drugs. These simulations produce large files containing a lot of information and are computationally demanding to produce, but at the moment there is no repository that would support easy file sharing between researchers. So, I presented the idea of creating a repository for molecular dynamics simulation, named MDbox, at the HealthHack and was amazed by what can be achieved in such a short time!
image courtesy of Dr Nick Hamilton
This was primarily due to the small, but very awesome team that gathered around my idea, with most of the work carried out by Elliot Smith and Matthew Brown.
image courtesy of Dr Nick Hamilton
image courtesy of Dr Nick Hamilton
The entire concept of HealthHack was something very new to me; I enjoyed a different perspective to health problems and learned many new things over the course of the weekend, not to mention the enthusiasm of surrounding participants. Even better, our team won the second place!
image courtesy of Dr Nick Hamilton
But there’s more – just after the HealthHack in October last year, I moved to Canberra to take up another postdoc at ANU. Earlier this year, I successfully gained a grant from the ACT Innovation Development fund to develop my idea from HealthHack into a fully-fledged prototype. I have a lot to thank to HealthHack, which was definitely the first step in pursuing an idea that I had simmering for a long time. And look at me now – received funding to further develop my concept AND being a HealthHack organiser in Canberra!
Don’t miss your opportunity to make your ideas come true! Come and join us!