Computer engineering major Samarpan Mohanty and his teammates received the “Best Use of Notability” award in the Cal Hacks 13.0 hackathon, held in San Francisco Oct. 23-25.
Cal Hacks is the world’s largest collegiate hackathon, a three-day event during which hackers creatively collaborate on innovative technology for a chance to win prizes while also attending workshops and panels. Cal Hacks is hosted by Hackathons @ Berkeley and sponsored by several major tech companies. Notability, a digital note-taking and productivity application developed by Ginger Labs for Apple devices, sponsored an award for the best use of their product.
Mohanty and his teammates, Sathvik Kumar of Santa Clara University, Ashton Noah Legaspi of California State University, Long Beach, and Mohit Suresh Chandar of the University of California, Santa Cruz, received Notability’s award for their project, DrugPersona, an interactive 3D biology lab and consented data network for rare disease research. DrugPersona is designed to help researchers explore patient data, evidence, and treatment ideas, while also helping patients understand consent, how their contributions are used, and agreed-upon compensation. The platform is also designed to help with drug discovery by allowing researchers to edit a drug's molecule, inspect gene sequences, and watch AI agents “debate” a drug from cited FDA, clinical trial, and PubMed evidence, complete with a 3D simulation of the outcome.
Mohanty, who has been building products at hackathons for five years, said the idea for DrugPersona was inspired by his research experience with digital twins, which offer a virtual replica of a system, process, or physical object to provide real-time data. Mohanty is a co-founder of SPADE Twin, a project started with a small team of chemical and biomolecular engineering researchers at UNL to build a reaction-centric digital twin for prodrug design.
“Treatments made for everyone, like chemotherapy, don't work on everyone, so we decided on personalized medicine for patients,” Mohanty said. “That way, they get paid, have better chances of a cure, and receive recognition for sharing their health records for research and development.”
The trip was funded by Witty Srisa-an, professor and director of the School of Computing, and James Stine, Jim and Gail Anderson Professor of Engineering and chair of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.
“I'm really grateful to Dr. Srisa-an and Dr. Stine,” Mohanty said. “Without their support, this trip would have been so expensive for me.”
Mohanty said he was also grateful for the opportunity to network and exchange ideas he can continue to build upon in the future.
“The best part was the people,” Mohanty said. “I kicked the weekend off with a chat with founders across San Francisco at Corgi Cafe, then built all weekend at the Palace of Fine Arts alongside founders and builders, and I came back with ideas and connections I want to bring back to UNL.”
November 12, 2026
Samarpan Mohanty and his teammates at Cal Hacks 13.0.
