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Cooper Team Wins 2nd Place in Digital Hackathon

POSTED ON: September 9, 2025

Poko team

A student team from The Cooper Union was awarded second prize in the 2025 Pfizer Digital Hackathon, a national competition designed to inspire innovative digital health solutions. This year’s hackathon brought together 87 students across 15 teams from 11 universities, with only seven advancing to the final round at Pfizer’s global headquarters in New York City.

The Hackathon’s theme was “Health Solutions: Fostering Innovation and Creativity in the Healthcare Sector.” Teams were challenged to develop minimum viable products (MVPs) addressing one of six real-world problem statements, including remote health monitoring, climate-driven health alerts, and others. The Cooper Union team selected the track called Cancer Patient Navigation Tools, which asked: “How might we create a digital companion that supports cancer patients throughout their journey, from diagnosis to survivorship, by simplifying access to care, information, and emotional support?”

In response, the team developed Poko: A Digital Companion for Pediatric Cancer Patients and Families. Poko is designed to give children their voice back while providing caregivers with critical organizational tools. Through gamified daily missions, mood tracking, educational resources, and a caregiver portal, Poko helps transform the pediatric cancer journey into one of clarity, empowerment, and resilience.

Jaehyeon (Zach) Park served as the team's leader and worked with teammates Myisha Hassan ME’26, Wongee Hong ME’26, Calcifer Kim ME’26, and Meghan Notkin EE’26. The team made a short video showing some of POKO's capabilities.

This is the second year in a row that Cooper students have placed in the hackathon.

More News from The Cooper Union

  • Founded by inventor, industrialist and philanthropist Peter Cooper in 1859, The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art offers education in art, architecture and engineering, as well as courses in the humanities and social sciences.

  • “My feelings, my desires, my hopes, embrace humanity throughout the world,” Peter Cooper proclaimed in a speech in 1853. He looked forward to a time when, “knowledge shall cover the earth as waters cover the great deep.”

  • From its beginnings, Cooper Union was a unique institution, dedicated to founder Peter Cooper's proposition that education is the key not only to personal prosperity but to civic virtue and harmony.

  • Peter Cooper wanted his graduates to acquire the technical mastery and entrepreneurial skills, enrich their intellects and spark their creativity, and develop a sense of social justice that would translate into action.