Students create DiatoMeter at William & Mary’s 12th annual hackathon
September 26–27, 2026
By Emmanuel Sampson
On September 26–27, 2026, the Nano & Biomaterials Lab participated for the first time in &hacks XII, William & Mary’s 12th annual hackathon. The 24-hour event brought students together to build projects and tackle practical challenges, including a problem drawn directly from the lab’s research: how to turn detailed images of diatoms into useful measurements more efficiently.
Students Menilik Deneke, Damir Syrlybayev, and Aditya Thakur developed DiatoMeter, a web application designed to analyze images from scanning electron microscopes. Their prototype uses image processing to count diatom shells, measure their dimensions, assess damage, and examine pores when the image provides enough detail. With this, researchers can acquire and measure individual shell characteristics on screen and download the results as a spreadsheet without ever having to count the frustules by hand.
DiatoMeter was named a winner in the Gold Prizes and Nano Bio Lab categories, marking an encouraging beginning to the lab’s involvement in the hackathon. With further testing against manual measurements, this tool could help scientists spend less time measuring images and more time exploring what these remarkable natural structures can do.
