The  GHR Hackathon 2025 was held in the beautiful location of the Montserrat mountain range from 27–29 January 2025. Members of the Global Health Resilience group from the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (Spain), and several international researchers from Universidad de los Andes (Colombia), Fiocruz (Brazil), Red Cross Climate Centre (UK), Charité Universitätsmedizin Berlin (Germany) and a journalist from the BBC came together to work on advancing the development of several R packages within climate & health research.

The event kicked off with an engaging icebreaker led by Tilly Alcayna, setting a focused and creative atmosphere. This was followed by technical introductions to the structure of R-packages and unit testing, presented by Giovenale Moirano and Raul Capellán, providing all participants with the technical foundation necessary to tackle the coding challenges ahead. 

The primary goal of the hackathon was to advance the developments of three R-packages. The participants were split into three dedicated working groups, with each group focusing on one package throughout the entire hackathon.

• Clim4health is designed for loading, processing and visualising climate data. While its functions are already quite advanced, the focus during the hackathon was on improving the interconnectivity between them, and improving the documentation (i.e. vignettes). The aim was to ensure clarity for new users, making it easy to understand each function’s purpose and how to use it effectively.
• GHRexplore facilitates visualising already cleaned datasets. The efforts during the hackathon were centred on testing the package with diverse datasets from multiple sources, ensuring robustness across different data structures. Additionally, new plot types and functionalities that benefit the future users were identified.
• GHRmodel is a package designed to fit Bayesian spatiotemporal models. During the hackathon, the focus lay on enhancing the user experience for model specification and on expanding the range of model-fitting functionalities—particularly those that handle non-linear relationships between covariates and outcomes.

All these tasks require creative problem solving and being able to see challenges from a new point of view. Recognising that creativity flourishes best outside of our routine environments, this hackathon was intentionally organised in a remote location. To prevent the feeling of simply working from a different desk and to encourage inspiration, scheduled hikes allowed participants to get fresh air and enjoy the landscape. These hikes became opportunities for spontaneous discussions outside of the established working groups.  Below you can see part of the group making their way to the viewpoint next to Santa Madalena Superior – over 1100m high!

On top of these scheduled opportunities, new displays of creativity also arose organically during the hackathon in the form of several small group activities, such as pre-dinner yoga, mid-day stretching session, and sunrise hikes. These activities demonstrated that the participants felt truly comfortable and inspired.

Last but not least, the hackathon also included two dynamic brainstorming sessions on future packages that will be developed in the future to complete the climate & health research pipeline in R. These packages will be developed over 2025 and could very well be the topic of next year's edition of the GHR Hackathon!