Team takes two top prizes at Northwestern’s WildHacks
WildHacks winner
A UIC team took home two prizes at Northwestern University’s WildHacks 2026 Hackathon for developing a navigation and support app for individuals who are sensitive to their environment.
The team—which included computer science students Ayush Bhardwaj, Gia Han Dang, Yamaan Nandolia, and Khoi Nguyen (Nathan) Trinh—nabbed first place in the Community track and second place for Anthropic’s Claude Code Sponsor Prize.
This year’s challenge included nearly 250 participants from 53 colleges and took place in April. The hackathon included 68 projects across three tracks: childhood games (past), problem-solving for community causes (present), and predictive data storytelling (future). The top 25 teams demonstrated their project’s functionality to a panel of judges and other hackathon participants.
The UIC team’s project, Haven, helps users find comfortable places by scoring noise, lighting, and crowd levels. The app uses a cellphone camera and microphone to estimate crowd levels, measure noise, and check brightness in real time, and also suggests calmer nearby options.
Through their app, the team hopes to ease stress level for the more than 60 million people in the U.S. who are neurodivergent, including individuals with ADHA, autism, anxiety, and other sensitivities.
Bhardwaj, Nandiola, and Trinh have participated in multiple hackathons together and took third place as the best overall project at WildHacks in 2025. Dang joined their team this year and has also participated in several hackathons.
“Everyone wants to win, but I believe losing teaches you the most. It makes you understand your mistakes, think deeply about what you could do better, and create a plan to improve,” Bhardwaj said. “When you can grow from a loss and come back stronger, that in itself is a win.”
The team is especially proud that the program runs entirely in the browser, and no special hardware is needed. Next steps would include integrating Haven with smart glasses and wearables to allow for tracking of heart rate, body temperature, and stress signals.
Bhardwaj and Nandolia graduated in December 2025, and Trinh graduates in May. Nandolia works as a technical product associate at Fulcrum GT, a Schaumburg-based company that provides an end-to-end digital business platform, specifically designed for the legal and professional services markets.
Trinh and Bhardwaj are joining the same company as software engineering interns, through the company’s Startup Summer Camp. Dang, a sophomore, will work with Inspiration Corporation, a Chicago-based nonprofit that helps people affected by homelessness and poverty, through a UIC Sprinternship, or mini-internship, this summer.