STEM4Health Hackathon


Elisabet Capón García joined the SDSC in March 2023 as Open Research Community Manager for the Renku team.
Elisabet obtained her PhD. in Process Systems Engineering. After that, she has led and worked over 10 years in multiple projects in the academia and the industry, related to the design and implementation of decision support systems for several industry sectors. Elisabet is highly concerned with the challenges our modern society faces, and deeply committed to sustainability.


Marisol has a degree in Law and more than 15 years of experience working as a notary officer in Madrid. After relocating to Switzerland with her family, she obtained a certification to teach Spanish as a foreign language, dedicating four years to teaching Spanish online to students of all ages and backgrounds. Marisol has returned to her professional roots as an administrative assistant, joining the SDSC team in June 2023.


Valerio started his career working for 7 years as a particle-physics researcher at CERN. In 2016, he moved to consulting, applying data science in several industries. First, he joined the Quant team of Ernst & Young in Geneva. Later, he created his own company, SamurAI sàrl, providing consulting services for his clients. He also has a passion for teaching very complex subjects in simple terms. That is why he particularly enjoys offering training programs to private companies and universities. Valerio joined the SDSC in May 2022 as a Principal Data Scientist with the mission of accompanying industrial partners and other institutions through their data science journey.

Presentation
The STEM 4 Health Hackathon, jointly organized by Johnson & Johnson in Switzerland and the Swiss Data Science Center (SDSC), brings together students in engineering, data science, and related STEM fields to tackle real-world challenges in pharmaceutical manufacturing.
Working in interdisciplinary teams, participants will use manufacturing data and state-of-the-art mechanistic modeling, AI and machine learning techniques to develop innovative workflows, models and automation strategies. The goal: explore new approaches that can advance the Industry 4.0 transformation of manufacturing for next-generation therapies.
Throughout the hackathon, teams will receive mentoring from industry and academic experts, turn their ideas into practical prototypes or process concepts, and pitch their solutions to a panel of judges for the chance to win prizes and explore potential follow‑up collaborations.
Ready to put your STEM skills at work on a challenge that matters? Register now to turn bold ideas into tangible advances that could help bring therapies to patients faster.
Who should participate?
Target audience:
- Bachelor & master students
- Early career researchers - PhD students and post-docs
- Young professionals from the private and public sector
All backgrounds are welcome, especially life sciences, chemistry, engineering, computer science and related fields.
Why attend? What you’ll take away
- Bring your STEM skills to solve real-world challenges in pharmaceutical manufacturing by applying problem-solving, STEM and data science skills.
- Gain a behind-the-scenes perspective on how medicines are developed and manufactured, while learning alongside peers and industry experts.
- Learn from experienced professionals through hands-on mentoring and direct exchange with senior experts.
- Experience collaborative innovation in action and see how interdisciplinary teamwork can create societal impact and measurable business value.
- Build your network and community with fellow students, researchers and professionals who share an interest in technology, science and healthcare.
- Explore purpose-driven career paths and discover opportunities at Johnson & Johnson for graduate students, postgraduates and postdocs.

About the organizers:
Johnson & Johnson is a global healthcare leader, committed to solving the toughest health challenges and transforming lives through research, development, manufacture and distribution of medicines and medical technologies. The company’s Innovative Medicine business advances breakthrough science and develops transformational treatments in areas like oncology, immunology, neuroscience, and cardiopulmonary. In MedTech, the company is focused on developing and delivering cardiovascular, surgery, and vision solutions. Visit jnj.com to learn more.
The Swiss Data Science Center (SDSC) is a national research infrastructure in data science, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), founded by EPFL and ETH Zurich. Its mission - to enable data-driven science and innovation for societal impact - drives its initiatives in research projects, knowledge and technology transfer, and education.
Details
STEM4Health Hackathon
· Date: 21-22 November 2026
· Time: 08:30 am – 22:00 / 17:00 pm
· Location: ETH Zürich, Campus Hönggerberg, HPH (Physics building)
· Capacity: 100 participants
· Participation fee: Free of charge. Travel & accommodation self-organized.
· Platform: RenkuLab, SDSC's open platform for collaborative and reproducible compute environments provided for all teams.
Programme
Preliminary Agenda:
Saturday, 21 November 2026
8:30 Welcome coffee
9:00 Plenary talks
10:30 Group Formation & start hacking
12:00 Lunch
13:00 Hacking time
22:00 Closing of building
Sunday, 22 November 2026
8:30 Welcome coffee
9:00 Hacking time
12:00 Lunch
13:00 Continue hacking and wrapping up results
15:00 Demo presentations & Prizes
17:00 End
For questions contact us at hackathon@datascience.ch.
Cover Image source: Adobe Stock, Viktor
Other events
Synthetic Data for Biomedical Applications


Before joining SDSC, Arshjot Khehra received his MSc in Artificial Intelligence from USI Lugano, where he completed his thesis on hierarchical graph reinforcement learning. Previously, he worked for 4+ years across India and Singapore gaining data science experience in insurance, logistics, and manufacturing sectors. He also holds a BSc in Industrial Engineering from PEC Chandigarh. Over the course of his career, Arshjot worked on a wide array of projects, such as, handwritten text recognition and generation, voice matching across phone call recordings, policy lapse rate prediction for customer retention, and automated insurance claim processing.


Matthias Galipaud obtained his PhD in evolutionary biology in 2012 from the University of Burgundy in Dijon (France), and held postdoctoral positions as a mathematical biologist at the university of Bielefeld (Germany) and the university of Zurich, where he researched the evolutionary theories of aging and mate choice. In 2020, he became a data scientist, developing machine learning solutions for startups in Switzerland and Australia before joining the SDSC Innovation Team in November 2022.


Valerio started his career working for 7 years as a particle-physics researcher at CERN. In 2016, he moved to consulting, applying data science in several industries. First, he joined the Quant team of Ernst & Young in Geneva. Later, he created his own company, SamurAI sàrl, providing consulting services for his clients. He also has a passion for teaching very complex subjects in simple terms. That is why he particularly enjoys offering training programs to private companies and universities. Valerio joined the SDSC in May 2022 as a Principal Data Scientist with the mission of accompanying industrial partners and other institutions through their data science journey.
Data Science for the Sciences


Guillaume Obozinski graduated with a PhD in Statistics from UC Berkeley in 2009. He did his postdoc and held until 2012 a researcher position in the Willow and Sierra teams at INRIA and Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris. He was then Research Faculty at Ecole des Ponts ParisTech until 2018. Guillaume has broad interests in statistics and machine learning and worked over time on sparse modeling, optimization for large scale learning, graphical models, relational learning and semantic embeddings, with applications in various domains from computational biology to computer vision.
ENID | Enabling Innovation with Data Science at UNIL-EPFL


Prof. Olivier Verscheure is the director and founder of the Swiss Data Science Center (SDSC). Olivier also co-leads a joint training program between EPFL and HEC Lausanne, specifically designed for senior executives. Since 2018, Olivier has been a member of the Board of Directors of Lonza, a global leader in the life sciences sector. This company provides products and services to the pharmaceutical, biotechnology, and specialized healthcare industries.Olivier began his career at IBM Research after earning his Ph.D. in computer science from EPFL. He held several research and leadership positions at the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center in New York and co-created and co-directed the IBM Research center in Dublin, Ireland, before joining the EPFL in 2016.


Matthias Galipaud obtained his PhD in evolutionary biology in 2012 from the University of Burgundy in Dijon (France), and held postdoctoral positions as a mathematical biologist at the university of Bielefeld (Germany) and the university of Zurich, where he researched the evolutionary theories of aging and mate choice. In 2020, he became a data scientist, developing machine learning solutions for startups in Switzerland and Australia before joining the SDSC Innovation Team in November 2022.


Olivier joined the SDSC as a data scientist focused on industry collaborations in February 2023. He obtained a MSc in Physics (2017) from EPFL with a minor in Mathematics, and a PhD in Astrophysics (2021) from Aix-Marseille University. Before joining the SDSC, he worked in a small start-up, as a data scientist, on a variety of topics, including data wrangling, natural language processing and time series forecasting.


Clément Lefeebvre joined the SDSC in January 2019 as a Data Scientist with an emphasis on industry-oriented projects in the Innovation team, based in Lausanne.
He holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Physics, acquired in 2016 from the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland. Following this, he earned a Master of Science in Computational Science and Engineering in 2018, also from EPFL. Throughout his academic journey, Clément concentrated on leveraging Data Science and Machine Learning techniques to enhance efficiency in industrial processes. Subsequently, he developed a specialized interest in Generative AI, with a particular focus on Natural Language Processing (NLP), especially in the application of Large Language Models for innovation.


Thibaut holds a B.Sc in Computer Science from HEIG-VD. Before joining the SDSC, he worked in startups where he developped a diverse skill set combining cloud infrastructure, database and application development. Thibaut is very enthusiatic about new technologies and best coding practices and he is looking forward to supporting the team and its projects.
Contact us
Would you like to explore how we can work together?
Our team of data scientists and professionals looks forward to engaging in impactful, results-driven collaborations with you.