2024 MIT Policy Hackathon

The MIT Policy Hackathon is an annual event organized by graduate students from the MIT Institute for Data, Systems, and Society (IDSS), including Master's students from the MIT Technology and Policy Program (TPP) and PhD students from the Social and Engineering Systems Program (SES).

The MIT Policy Hackathon promotes four important goals:

1) Empower participants from MIT and beyond to engage in the science-policy lifecycle. We bring together data scientist, policy analysts, legal scholars, and more to form interdisciplinary teams to collaborate and tackle society's most complex and pressing challenges in 48 hours.

2) Strengthen partnerships between MIT and other stakeholders across academic, policy, and industry. Hackathon projects from previous years have led to publications and collaborations between the Institute and research partners identified through the Hackathon.

3) Promote interdisciplinary data science research at MIT. Prior participants have pitched solutions to challenge in the domains of climate resilience, health access, cybersecurity, and much more. The Hackathon has also successfully recruited students to MIT graduate programs at the IDSS and beyond.

4) Inform real-world policymaking through data-driven solutions. Every year, teams compete across four challenge domains and use their data science and policy analysis skills to pitch innovative solutions to our judges. These projects provide our challenge sponsors with fresh and dynamic ideas crafted by interdisciplinary teams over Hackathon weekend, impacting real-world policymaking.

Our organizing committee members are:

• Eric Liu (co-chair)

• Yael Cervantes (co-chair)

• Hannah Rajput (logistics director)

• Albert Chen (challenge director for climate)

• Carlotta Barone-MacDonald (challenge director for deep tech)

• Nathan Collett (challenge director for sustainable housing)

How You Can Help

2024 is the first year since the COVID pandemic the Hackathon will be held fully in person. Your generous support would make this transformative experience possible for our over 100 participants from MIT and beyond, and engage them in tackling society's most complex challenges in the domains of climate, health equity, sustainability, and deep tech policy.

• A gift of $60 will cover one additional participant in this year's Hackathon
• A gift of $100 will cover one additional participant in this year's Hackathon, including dinners on Hackathon weekend

Donors will be thanked in the event program for the 2024 MIT Policy Hackathon.