UAB Students Triumph in Regional Cybersecurity Hackathon with Innovative Edge

Summary

• Victory: Three University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) students won first place in the cybersecurity category at the Innovate Hackathon.
• Innovative Approach: The team built a privacy-preserving app for securing patient health data.
• Mentorship and Preparation: All three are in UAB’s Master of Science in Cybersecurity program and the NSF CyberCorps: Scholarship for Service program.
• Future Implications: The students say the win will help them in the job market.

UAB team takes the cybersecurity category

Three UAB computer science students, Hunter Forsythe, McKinley Morris and Williams Beaumont, took first place in the cybersecurity category at the Innovate Hackathon, held at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, UAB announced in June 2025.

The challenge

The prompt was the “Secure Healthcare Data Management Challenge.” Teams had to build a system that stores and retrieves sensitive patient health information securely while still working across the different platforms hospitals and clinics use, which is one of the harder problems in health IT.

What the team built

The UAB team built a privacy-preserving application that balanced data security with usability. “We were expecting a red team vs. blue team challenge but instead faced full-stack development,” Beaumont said in UAB’s announcement. “It was tough, but we pulled through.”

How they prepared

The students credited their coursework. Modern Cryptography helped. So did Computer Security and Software Engineering, where they learned the secure authentication and encryption methods they built into the project.

Faculty behind the program

Ragib Hasan, director of the UAB Center for Cybersecurity, leads the university’s Scholarship for Service fellows. “Our program equips students with essential skills in digital forensics, network security, cryptography and more,” said Yuliang Zheng, chair of the Department of Computer Science.

Why hackathon wins matter

Demand for security workers keeps growing. Employers want proof that candidates can build working systems under deadline.

What comes next for the team

“This win is just a reminder to keep working hard, and will open doors for future opportunities,” Forsythe said. Morris called applying class material to a real problem “a full-circle moment.”

What the win shows

The UAB team’s first place shows what students can do with strong coursework and a hard deadline. They nearly quit at midnight. Then they won.

Frank Jones, CISSP

Frank Jones has loved computers from the age of 13. Frank got his hacking career started when he downloaded a war dialing program that he used to detect dial up modems in his hometown of Chicago. Frank Jones now works as a JAVA coder and cyber security researcher.