PPE/TESTING
COVID-19
NJIT’S COVID CAVALRY WHEN THE PANDEMIC DIMMED CAMPUS LIGHTS, HIGHLANDERS ROARED BACK WITH INGENUITY AND GRIT
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n mid-March, the COVID-19 pandemic abruptly shuttered classrooms, laboratories and workspaces across the campus. But no sooner were the lights extinguished than the global NJIT community mobilized to address the unprecedented global crisis. Here are some of the many ways our community responded.
Honors Scholars Produce Thousands of PPE
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t all started with an email sent by NJIT/ Albert Dorman Honors College (ADHC) alumnus, Biren Bhatt, M.D., to Louis Hamilton, ADHC dean, as the coronavirus pandemic was spreading with lightning speed throughout the New York-New Jersey area. Dr. Bhatt, an emergency medicine physician at Hackensack University Medical Center (HUMC), asked the dean to put out a call to Dorman Scholars to design and create a prototype for a face shield, vital personal protective equipment (PPE) for health care workers. The very next day, a Saturday, ADHC messaged its student body that it was holding a competition for both face shield design and production — offering Amazon
2 2020 President’s Report
gift cards as incentives and providing a supplies list that included marine-grade vinyl, industrial tape, foam and elastic. Over that weekend, nine designs were submitted by some 20 students working either individually or on teams, and then sent to Dr. Bhatt and HUMC for approval. The design they green-lighted was from Greg Tanis, a mechanical engineering major who graduated May 2020. Tanis also produced the highest quantity of face shields — more than 500 — by the end of that week, delivering them to Valley Hospital. At the same time, Laura Gould, then a third-year architecture student and fellow Dorman Scholar, was already creating and sending triple-cotton masks to Mount Sinai Medical Center in Manhattan. Modifying a design from a YouTube surgical-mask tutorial, and working with her mother, she had sent the hospital 200
masks. By mid-May, Tanis had produced nearly 1,500 face shields and Gould more than 1,200 masks for hospitals, emergency rooms and community organizations in the New York-metro region. Naira Abou-Ghali, a biology student of both ADHC and the Ronald E. McNair Post-baccalaureate Achievement Program, spearheaded the initiative. Scholars producing shields and masks were offered reimbursement with service-learning grants from the Dean’s Fund for Student Development. These efforts to better the health of our community continue through ProtectNJ (ProtectNJ.Life), co-founded by AbouGhali and Gould. n
Above: Some of Laura Gould’s masks in a multicolored array.
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