This weekend, Brown’s Center for Human Rights and Humanitarian Studies hosted its annual Hack for Humanity, a two-day event where teams compete to address global humanitarian issues. This year, 12 teams were challenged to craft innovative solutions to global gun violence and present them a 10-minute pitch for a chance to win a $3,000 seed grant.
“Luna” — an app created by Dimitra Sofianou ’26, Camila Murillo ’26, Bisola Folarin ’26 and Natalia Baños Delgado ’26, who is a member of The Herald’s Data Desk — was awarded the first-place prize.
The app aims to prevent domestic abuse by giving women the privacy to discuss their experiences with interpersonal violence and seek help. The team designed the app, which is disguised as a period tracker, for a pilot in Ecuador because of the country’s high rates of gender-based violence, Baños Delgado said.
The app sees “things as they escalate in real time” before sharing that data with a nongovernmental organization so they can respond appropriately, Sofianou said.
“We don’t think the problem is a lack of resources, but the gap that we identified was accessing” them, Sofianou explained, noting that while organizations provide resources to address gender-based violence, oftentimes “women cannot access them because of … fear of retaliation.”
With the grant, the group aims to develop the app further, connect with NGOs and conduct outreach to make the app accessible, Folarin said.
The two runners-up, “Stop the Spiral” and “Ghost Busters,” were also awarded $1,500 each to support their projects.
“Ghost Busters” sought to help 3D printing companies detect pieces of ghost guns — untraceable firearms that are constructed from smaller building blocks — through a pattern recognition algorithm.
With their $1,500 grant, the team first wants to ensure “the algorithm is working well,” said Evanour Hamadeh ’27, a member of the team. To achieve this, the group hopes to “loop in experts” and purchase a 3D printer, she added.
The other runner-up, “Stop the Spiral,” pitched an educational program to teach children how to spot signs of domestic violence. The group plans to use their seed grant to collaborate with local domestic violence prevention organizations and begin piloting curriculum, team member Daniel Bae ’29 wrote in an email to The Herald.
“We selected those three in particular because we thought that they addressed a cross section of issues,” said keynote León Castellanos-Jankiewicz, a senior researcher at the Asser Institute for International and European Law in The Hague. “They represented a lot of the important challenges that we have today.”
The teams were assessed by a panel of judges, which included Castellanos-Jankiewicz, Adam Levine, the associate dean of global health equity and professor of emergency medicine and international and public affairs, and Ieva Jusionyte, director of the CHRHS and professor of international security and anthropology.
Teams were also given an opportunity to sign up for office hour sessions with five experts in gun policy and violence prevention, including Castellanos-Jankiewicz and Jusionyte.
“I feel like it is very easy in competitions like this to go into the idealistic,” said Zara Lagumdzija ’28, who participated in the event. “It’s very helpful to have mentors whose job is to poke holes in your ideas.”
Sarya Kilic ’28, another Hack for Humanity participant, said that while some groups directly addressed gun violence, others confronted the secondary impacts of gun violence — similar to those mentioned in Jusionyte’s keynote.
“We thought that this representation of issues is exactly the kind of thinking we need in order to address and solve the problem of gun violence,” Castellanos-Jankiewicz said.
Emily Feil is a senior staff writer covering staff and student labor. She is a freshman from Long Beach, NY and plans to study economics and English. In her free time, she can be found watching bad TV and reading good books.
