Alumni Rising To The Challenge

COVID HEROES

ALUMS FIGHT COVID

Alisa Payne talks with a crew member on set.

ALIGNED

Alisa Payne ’94

What does a film producer do during a pandemic-induced industry shutdown?

Alisa Payne ’94 produced a film.

Rejecting all the reasons not to make a movie in the summer of 2020, Payne masterminded 26 location shoots in six cities to deliver for broadcast the compelling HBO production “Between the World and Me,” the adaptation of an acclaimed Ta-Nehisi Coates book, in a mere 16 weeks.

Bringing Coates’ words to screen was an urgent priority for the project team in the aftermath of the George Floyd killing. Payne accepted the challenge: “It aligned with who I am as a person.”

Compounding the project’s complexity was the need to scrupulously adhere to a myriad of Covid-era restrictions. “Good old Brooklyn Tech ingenuity” got her through, Payne says.

“Between the World and Me” was nominated for a Critic’s Choice award and received a 95% Rotten Tomatoes rating. The film features a future Brooklyn Tech alum: Payne’s son Maddox, then a sophomore, had a cameo.

Payne says she hopes her work “will effectuate change and make viewers work towards a truly anti-racist society.” ■

FOOD CHAIN

Donald Hong ’75

Donald Hong ’75 knows what to do with 11,000 gallons of milk and a trailer of cauliflower and bananas: give them away.

The real estate entrepreneur started a food pantry in a vacant Manhattan storefront as Covid tightened its grip in March 2020. Before long the nonprofit group he heads, UA3, was a fourborough behemoth of benevolence distributing food to other pantries across the city.

From Sunset Park to the South Bronx, Hong’s UA3 orchestrated an intricate supply chain that in one year brought six million pounds of meats, produce, cereals, and those 11,000 gallons of milk per week from federal warehouses and supermarkets to senior centers, public housing, and other underserved groups.

Deliveries of cartons grew so tall that local pantries literally couldn’t handle them. So UA3 bought a forklift to facilitate the transfers.

“When there’s a fire, someone has to put it out,” Hong says. “We saw the need and the suffering. It was a calling.” ■ To learn more about UA3: https://www.ua3now.org/

UA3 volunteers prepare food for distribution at a Brooklyn park.

Dr. Konrad Hayashi was a point person for the military on Covid protocols.

ON DUTY

Konrad Hayashi, M.D. ’73

The epic saga of the Diamond Princess gripped the world in the pandemic’s early days: a cruise ship with 3,711 souls aboard, hundreds of them Covid-afflicted, stranded in quarantine for weeks.

Eventually the US government flew 328 Americans home to safety. Among the physicians it dispatched to support them was Konrad Hayashi , M.D. ’73.

“On pretty short notice” the lifelong public health physician for the military and the Centers for Disease Control was working 16-hour shifts, screening passengers’ health signs and symptoms until all were cleared or sent to hospitals, then monitoring the quarantined.

Throughout the pandemic Dr. Hayashi continued to serve on Covid duty, screening arriving civilian air passengers in Seattle and later overseeing mass vaccinations of soldiers in Georgia.

After years of dealing with the likes of Ebola, SARS and Zika, Dr. Hayashi was a likely candidate to join the front lines.

“When the opportunity came to help out I said certainly, I’d be glad to,” he said. ■

DOCTOR IN THE HOUSE

Brielle Cardieri, M.D. ’12

When the pandemic struck New York, Brielle Cardieri volunteered to accelerate her graduation from the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and join the front lines fighting Covid two months early.

“The thought of not helping felt so wrong to me,” she recalled a year later.

On April 20, 2020, she donned protective gear, scrubs, and her Brooklyn Tech sweatshirt to report for her first shift at Mount Sinai as Brielle Cardieri, MD.

Wearing Tech attire for her first day was a conscious choice: “My time at Brooklyn Tech exemplifies best my appreciation for the places that contributed to all that I have learned.”

Immediately assigned to a Covid unit at Mount Sinai, Brielle worked 12 hour shifts for weeks until the crisis abated. Death and despair were a constant presence, but so was the triumph of saving a life. Dr. Cardieri is now a second year psychiatry resident at Mount Sinai. On weekend shifts with their relaxed dress code, her preferred outfit is scrub pants and a Tech t-shirt. ■

ACT OF LOVE

Marsha Stephanie Blake ’92

At the terrifying height of New York’s outbreak, Ayisha Edwards, M.D. ’92 told her classmate and friend Marsha Stephanie Blake ’92 how Covid patients were arriving at her hospital workplace “in droves,” amid a dire shortage of personal protection equipment for staff.

Blake is an Emmynominated actress (When They See Us, Orange is the New Black,) whose work was sidelined by the pandemic lockdown. She dug a sewing machine out from her closet, and watched YouTube tutorials to refresh her sewing skills. Dr. Edwards and her colleagues quickly had a box of beautiful masks made with love.

Soon Blake was working into the night regularly, crafting masks for health workers, other essential workers, and finally anyone who asked. Bolts of dazzling Africaninspired fabric arrived to add a dash of flair. By July 2020, with the crisis easing, she had made and mailed more than 500 masks at her own expense.

“People would stop me in the street. I’d get requests on Instagram from people all over the country,” Blake recalled. “I was a one-woman sweatshop.” ■

SEAT AT THE TABLE

Stefanie Watkins Nance, M.D, M.P.H. ’87

Dr. Watkins Nance is now Commander of the Medical Readiness Squadron at Andrews Air Force Base, which is responsible for protecting the health of all military personnel in the nation’s capital region.

PLANNING AHEAD

Johann Clendenin ’67

Post-pandemic life will be about reinvention: people and organizations needing different things, and wanting them in different places. Consider food: more is heading toward homes and less to office lunchrooms and restaurants. The global supply chain of just about everything is getting a shakeup.

Preparing for this new era is Johann Clendenin ’67. A lifelong logistics expert, he runs a business developing a massive “smart city” distribution complex in upstate Newburgh, near Stewart Airport. The planned facility is to serve New York City’s myriad needs for supplies of PPE, refrigerable vaccines, food, and consumer goods.

Clendenin expects the pandemic’s effects to linger for three to five years, with restaurant servers needing “billions of masks and gloves” and health providers storing vaccine. “A city waking up needs new logistic support,” he says. ■

Schematic models like this show how vital goods get from factory to end user.

An Air Force Colonel, Dr. Watkins Nance commanded a squadron providing care for 5,200 active duty military and oversaw the quarantine of 1,124 airmen at Dyess Air Force Base in Texas.

Contributing to a book on racial disparities in Covid treatment, she hit the lecture circuit – on Zoom, radio, and in person around the US and Latin America – exhorting Black and brown communities to get vaccinated. Refusing compensation even for travel expenses, she said: “I am paid by the numerous testimonies of people who got vaccinated after hearing me speak.”

Sixth generation military, she tells her story:

I am a Black female physician, raised by Black and brown communities, educated by Black and brown medical professionals and am here to serve Black and brown communities. Vaccine hesitancy is a real and legitimate fear based on the atrocities of the past, so I always use this quote in my lectures: “Don’t let the atrocities of the past kill us in the present by allowing fear to paralyze us from getting this life-saving vaccine.”

I feel I have an inherent added responsibility to speak. We have a seat at the table unlike back in the times of the Tuskegee experiment. It is a small seat, as Black female physicians only make up 2-3% of all physicians in our country, but those of us who sit in that seat have a job to do. I ask for nothing in return as I consider it my duty. If I don’t speak up, who will? If not now, when? ■