The Fred Hutch Girls Who Code club is an after-school club specifically designed for high school aged students (grades 10-12). It is organized and led by computational biology graduate students from Fred Hutch and UW. The club holds 2-3 sessions per year and meets on a weekly basis after school at the Fred Hutch campus.
Goal of Girls Who Code
The goal of the club to build a foundation in the logic and vocabulary of computer science through collaborative projects. In this past, this has included bioinformatics projects related to infectious diseases and protein evolution, as well as building and programming a robot to navigate a maze. We aim to explore coding and its applications in a wide variety of domains!
Girls Who Code is a national organization “on a mission to close the gender gap in technology”. The Fred Hutch Girls Who Code club is run by women/non-binary computational biologists at the University of Washington and Fred Hutch who are passionate about teaching and helping people learn about computer science and bioinformatics. Girls Who Code welcomes individuals from all backgrounds into our community and programs. Students are selected holistically, with emphasis on their potential to benefit from the program. We prioritize applicants with limited prior experience in computational biology who would significantly benefit from additional exposure and mentorship, encouraging them to pursue further study or research careers.
Spring 2026 Session
This spring, the Fred Hutch Girls Who Code club will be held in-person for 6 weeks at the Fred Hutch starting April 21st, 2026. Each session will be kept small (maximum 10-15 students) to facilitate group work. This spring, we will be working in small groups to explore robotics. We will incorporate a mix of virtual robots (from the VEXcode project) and real life robots that you can program to clean up coral reefs and drive through mazes. We will also have an extra session for local women in STEM to present 10 min lightenging talks on their research and how they got started with coding!
You're eligible to join our club if you:
- Are in high school (the program is typically the best fit for sophomores and juniors, but applications are also welcome from seniors)
- Are interested in learning about coding, computational biology, and bioinformatics
- Are available Tuesdays from 4:30-6:00pm, April 21st, 2026 – June 9th, 2026 for in-person sessions at Fred Hutch (you can ride the bus for free with your school ID, or you can request a youth ORCA card).
Field Trips
We go on several field trips a year to expose the club members to different careers which use coding. In the past, we have taken tours of computational biology labs at Fred Hutch and met with female programmers and data scientists at Amazon, Facebook, Uber, Just Biotherapeutics, and Microsoft.
Meet Our Lead Facilitators
All our facilitators are junior researchers at the University of Washington and/or Fred Hutch who use computational approaches in their work and enjoy mentoring the next generation of women in science and technology!
