This weekend, the Center for Human Rights and Humanitarian Studies hosted its annual Hack for Humanity, a project competition focused on creating policy solutions for pressing humanitarian issues. This year, 55 students across 12 teams developed projects around this year’s theme of combatting “mis/disinformation.”
Two teams won first place this year, earning eligibility for $3,000 in seed funding to further develop their projects. The first winner, “Truth Fairy,” aims to educate rural communities on oral health and the second, “Elevas,” focuses on educating youth in rural agricultural communities on environmental-related health issues.
Maggie Murphy, assistant director of the center for human rights and humanitarian studies, said that this year’s Hack For Humanity solutions could be technical, but may also include educational campaigns, policy proposals and social programs.
“I like to think of (Hack for Humanity) as a Shark Tank for humanitarian solutions,” Murphy said. The event aims to provide students with more “experiential learning opportunities.”
Over the course of two days, student teams develop their projects with the help of faculty and practitioners. At the event’s end, the teams pitched their solutions to a panel of judges. Murphy said that encouraging students to work in teams to produce an original idea on a tight deadline can help expose them to a real work environment.
To fight misinformation in oral health, “Truth Fairy” — created by Lauren Lee ’28, Soyu Hong ’28, Margaret Wang ’28 and Huyen Nguyen ’28 — brings educational programs about flossing and other proper hygiene habits to rural communities, Lee said.
While “rural communities are one of the most vulnerable communities” facing health issues, interventions to improve education aren’t often geared toward rural populations, Lee said.
One particular knowledge gap comes from the fact that many rural communities rely on Medicaid, but some dental clinics do not accept it, Lee added. The “Truth Fairy” project hoped to bridge the gap of oral healthcare education for those without easy access to dental care.
The team hopes to work with an elementary school in Bartlesville, Oklahoma, Lee’s hometown, to “help families build healthy oral hygiene habits, while also dispelling misinformation regarding oral hygiene,” she added.
The team was mentored by Chikezirim Nwoke, postdoctoral research associate in international and public affairs, who aimed to help competing students better understand the real-life implications of their projects during the designing process.
“Sometimes when you design projects from the top, you don’t really account for how people who are actually on the ground will relate to it or will deploy the project,” he said.
Nwoke said that he used his background experiences and knowledge from previous research to advise the students. In the past, Nwoke focused on mitigating misinformation during elections in Cameroon and limiting disinformation among South Sudanese refugees in Uganda..
The other winning team, “Elevas,” was created by Daniel Soto Parra ’28, Ana Sofia Cepeda-Diaz ’27, Molly Ibrahim ’27 and Evan Hoefen ’29 to empower youth in Franco Bido, a rural community in the Dominican Republic, by combatting environmental health misinformation, Parra said.
The name “Elevas” is an acronym for “empoderamiento y lucha estudiantil para verdad ambiental y salud, which roughly translates to student-led empowerment for environment and health truth,” Parra added.
The team hopes to collaborate with Education Across Borders in Franco Bido and develop an app to gather information on current local knowledge on environment-related disease, Ibrahim said. After development, the team would work with youth health promoters to design and implement a curriculum as an Education Across Borders summer program, she added.
Cepeda-Diaz said that 24% of global deaths are a result of environment-related diseases. In the Dominican Republic, reports of a bacterial infection that spreads between humans and animals, known as leptospirosis, rose by 95.6% from 2025 to 2026. “Rural communities are especially vulnerable to environment-related disease for reasons such as climate change and also because of misinformation,” she added.
If the government is unable to adequately educate some rural communities on disease transmission, those people may begin to consume unverified information through WhatsApp networks or artificial intelligence, she added. This “can lead to misunderstandings in the modes of disease transmission and also potential resorting to inaccurate medications that could exacerbate health complications,” Cepeda-Diaz said.
Cepeda-Diaz found the competition to be a “very valuable experience for (students) to grapple with these difficult questions and reflect on what it means to have a realistic, sustainable solution in a community.”
Tyler Timmers is a senior staff writer covering undergraduate student life.
