rlm@84: #+title: Victory at the Organ Preservation Alliance Global Organ Banking Summit
rlm@84: #+author: Robert McIntyre
rlm@84: #+email: rlm@mit.edu
rlm@84: #+setupfile: ../../aurellem/org/setup.org
rlm@84: #+include: ../../aurellem/org/level-0.org
rlm@84: 
rlm@84: #+caption: Trophy from the Organ Preservation Alliance's Global 
rlm@84: #+caption: Organ Banking Summit hackathon competition.  
rlm@84: #+ATTR_LaTeX: :width 5.5in :placement [H]
rlm@84: #+ATTR_HTML: width="300"
rlm@84: [[file:../images/organ-preservation-trophy.png][file:../images/organ-preservation-trophy.jpg]]
rlm@84: 
rlm@84: On February 26, 2015 I went to the [[http://www.organpreservationalliance.org/][Organ Preservation Alliance's]]
rlm@84: [[http://www.obs2015.org/][Global Organ Banking Summit]], where I competed in the hackathon
rlm@84: competition with around eight other teams from around the world. The
rlm@84: goal was to come up with promising new areas relating to organ
rlm@84: preservation, with an emphasis on novelty and practicality. Each team
rlm@84: was assigned a professional cryobiologist to help evaluate
rlm@84: ideas. There were three rounds of judging:
rlm@84: 
rlm@84: 1. An initial review of our ideas where we selected one to develop
rlm@84:    further.
rlm@84: 2. Presentation to a selected panel of judges. Only two teams would be
rlm@84:    selected out of the eight from this round.
rlm@84: 3. Final presentation to the entire Summit, where all the
rlm@84:    cryobiologists present would determine the winner.
rlm@84: 
rlm@84: Our team came up with the idea of poly-vitrification and presented the
rlm@84: following presentation, available here:
rlm@84: [[../ref/2015-McIntyre-OPA-hackathon-presentation.pdf][2015-McIntyre-OPA-hackathon-presentation]].
rlm@84: 
rlm@84: Later, we wrote up a summary and published it in an abstract in the
rlm@84: journal Cryobiology: [[http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0011224015001686][Poly-Vitrification Abstract]].
rlm@84: 
rlm@84: We gave a really solid presentation and ended up winning the
rlm@84: competition and the prize money, which we split four-ways among our
rlm@84: group members. It was really quite a fun experience!
rlm@84: 
rlm@84: