EthnoHack

🌿 EthnoHack 2026

Data Hackathon on Ethnopharmacology & Health

2–8 November 2026 · 100% Online · Discord + Devpost

Official participant registration closes on Octomber 31 at 11:00 PM. Registrations after this time will not be eligible for judging or prizes.

EthnoHack 2026 is a week-long online hackathon bringing together data scientists, AI researchers, computer scientists, bioinformaticians, pharmacognocists, botanists, historians, anthropologists, pharmacologists, ecologists, clinicians, and students to explore how computational methods can unlock the potential of traditional medicine and ethnopharmacology.

Across four challenge tracks, participants will work with open datasets, scientific literature, biodiversity data, chemical information, and digital health technologies to build innovative solutions addressing real-world challenges in:

• 🌿 Traditional knowledge 
  • Use NLP and AI to extract medicinal knowledge from historical, folklore texts and ethnobotanical studies. Map plant names across eras, identify therapeutic uses, and connect ancient knowledge to modern pharmacology.
• 🧪 Natural products and drug discovery
  • Apply machine learning and cheminformatics to identify promising plant-derived compounds for specific disease targets. Build predictive models, knowledge graphs, and screening pipelines.
• 🌍 Biodiversity and sustainability
  • Leverage geospatial and ecological datasets to map medicinal plant diversity, identify conservation risks, and develop tools for sustainable harvesting.
• 🩺 Digital health and phytotherapy
  • Design apps, decision-support tools, or recommendation engines that connect phytotherapy evidence to clinical or patient-facing contexts.

The hackathon is organised under the ETHCSTWIN framework and aims to create connections between academia, industry, technology, healthcare, and civil society.

Whether you are an experienced machine-learning researcher or a domain expert with a great research question, you are welcome to participate.

What makes EthnoHack special?

EthnoHack sits at the intersection of several disciplines that are rarely brought together in a single hackathon.

Participants will have the opportunity to combine:

• Artificial intelligence and machine learning

• Natural language processing

• Knowledge graphs

• Cheminformatics

• Bioinformatics

• Geospatial and biodiversity data

• Ethnobotanical and historical knowledge

• Natural products chemistry

• Digital health

• Scientific research and evidence synthesis

You don't need to be an expert in every field. Interdisciplinary teams are encouraged.

EthnoHack 2026 is 100% online.

Participants can join from anywhere in the world. Most collaboration will happen asynchronously through Discord, with scheduled mentoring, presentations, Q&A sessions, and the final pitch event.

Primary time zone: CET

Platforms: Devpost + Discord -> https://discord.gg/GrQRGfk9YK

Come with a research question, a technical skill, a domain expertise, or simply curiosity. Build something that connects traditional knowledge with the tools of tomorrow.

Requirements