NIAID-BRCs AI Codeathon 2.0

September 16-18, 2026 · Argonne National Laboratory, Lemont, IL

Three days of building AI-driven tools and workflows for infectious disease research, hosted by the NIAID Bioinformatics Resource Centers — BV-BRC, BRC Analytics, and the Pathogen Data Network. Applications for 2026 are closed; participants have been selected and project teams are being finalized.

Website	https://niaid-brc-codeathons.github.io/
Projects	https://niaid-brc-codeathons.github.io/projects/
Schedule	https://niaid-brc-codeathons.github.io/schedule/
2025 archive	https://niaid-brc-codeathons.github.io/projects/2025/

Each of the eleven 2026 projects has its own repository in this organization, seeded with the project pitch. Those pitches are starting points, not plans — teams develop them into project charters ahead of the event.

This repository holds the website itself. Everything below is about building and editing that site.

---

Built with Astro, a modern static site generator.

🚀 Project Structure

├── public/              # Static assets (fonts, favicon)
├── src/
│   ├── components/      # Reusable Astro components
│   ├── content/
│   │   └── projects/    # Project proposals as Markdown files (all years, flat)
│   │       └── themes/  # 2025 theme write-ups, not part of the collection
│   ├── layouts/         # Page layouts
│   ├── pages/           # Routes (file-based routing)
│   │   ├── index.astro  # Homepage
│   │   ├── schedule.astro # Event schedule
│   │   ├── report.astro # 2025 event report
│   │   └── projects/
│   │       ├── index.astro     # Current-year listing
│   │       ├── 2025.astro      # Archive listing
│   │       └── [...slug].astro # Detail page per project
│   └── consts.ts        # Site configuration
├── astro.config.mjs     # Astro configuration
└── package.json

🧞 Commands

All commands are run from the root of the project:

Command	Action
npm install	Installs dependencies
npm run dev	Starts local dev server at localhost:4321
npm run build	Build your production site to ./dist/
npm run preview	Preview your build locally, before deploying
npm run astro ...	Run CLI commands like astro add, astro check

📝 Adding Project Content

Project files all live flat in src/content/projects/ regardless of year — the year field is what splits them, so a project's URL never changes when a new codeathon comes around.

To add a project:

1. Create src/content/projects/my-project.md
2. Fill in the frontmatter:

   ---
   title: "Your Project Title"
   description: "One or two sentences, shown on the listing page"
   year: 2026
   order: 12 # position in the listing; current-year projects sort by this
   tags: ["AI", "Bioinformatics"]
   github: "https://github.com/NIAID-BRC-Codeathons/my-project"
   proposal: "https://..." # optional, adds a "Full proposal" button
   video: "https://..." # optional, added after the event
   ---

3. Write the body — current-year proposals use Goal / Three-Day MVP / Evaluation
4. The project appears on /projects (or /projects/2025 for year: 2025) and gets its own page automatically

Each project also gets a repository of the same name in the NIAID-BRC-Codeathons organization.

🗓️ Rolling over to a new codeathon

1. Update the event constants in src/consts.ts (dates, location, deadline, APPLICATIONS_OPEN)
2. Add the new project files with the new year
3. Point /projects at the new year and add an archive page for the outgoing one, following src/pages/projects/2025.astro
4. Add the archive to the NAV list in src/components/Header.astro

🌐 Deployment

This site is configured to deploy to GitHub Pages at https://niaid-brc-codeathons.github.io/

📚 Learn More

• Astro Documentation
• Astro Content Collections