Over the summer, junior Zeynep Ceyhun of the Thomas Jefferson School took home the third place title in the 2026 USAII Global AI Hackathon — a week-long competition where she built and coded a program using AI. Ceyhun and her partner, Yagmur Sakar, were tasked with using their project to “make something easier to understand.” The result was “Cabinet Clear.”

Cabinet Clear is a system that uses AI to help patients understand treatment plans. Users can upload their medical note or treatment plan to the system, and the artificial intelligence program Claude generates a summary of the text. Then, users scan their medical cabinet. The system then gives users a list of what medicine to throw away, what to keep and what to buy. Ceyhun says that the goal of Cabinet Clear is to help patients understand difficult medical language and terminology when it applies to their own treatment.

“My area of interest in coding is designing AI tools for the medical industry,” Ceyhun said. “I thought, maybe I can work with medical data. If it wasn’t connected to medicine, I wouldn’t be as interested in coding.”

Ceyhun and Sakar had only a week to train the AI and code the system. Ceyhun says that it was a stressful week as the two students rushed to work together from different cities. She says she worked on the project 5-8 hours a day during that week.

In the end, Cabinet Clear scored in the top three out of 320 submitted projects.

“They started (announcing winners) from first instead of third,” Ceyhun said. “When I heard that I wasn’t first, I lost hope. I really didn’t expect to be placed third. It was very surprising.”