Special Section: NJIT’s COVID Cavalry

COVID-19

NJIT’S COVID CAVALRY

WHEN THE PANDEMIC DIMMED CAMPUS LIGHTS, HIGHLANDERS ROARED BACK WITH INGENUITY AND GRIT

In 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

It 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 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.

Students Develop Unique Platform for Face-Shield Production

The students behind The CommonHealth Project — a collaborative, communitybased initiative aimed at rallying volunteers for production and distribution of urgently needed personal protective equipment (PPE) — came together through Albert Dorman Honors College’s PPE competition. They included Mark Pothen, a mechanical engineering major, Adé Kolade, a Dorman Scholar studying electrical engineering, and Ruth Fiore, Owais Aftab, Parth Agrawal and Juliana Yang, all biomedical engineering students (Aftab and Agrawal are also accelerated pre-health).

The CommonHealth Project was “peoplepowered,” with individuals volunteering their time to either construct face shields in their homes from pre-assembled kits, or deliver the kits to volunteers and then collect the end products and drive them to hospitals in Bergen and Morris counties. The crowdsourced model followed a strict no-contact policy, so kits were placed just outside builders’ houses for drop-offs and pickups. The kits included clear polyethylene terephthalate sheets, elastic bands, foam rectangles and staples for 10 shields.

Funding for the project was 100% donation-driven. NJIT and ADHC alumnus Vatsal Shah ’08, M.S. ’09, Ph.D. ’14, a civil engineer with Mott MacDonald, was instrumental in helping the team launch the project, with both a monetary gift and ongoing mentoring.

The CommonHealth Project quickly became a well-oiled machine. With 200 volunteers in Bergen and Morris counties, the initiative constructed and delivered 20,000 face shields to hospitals that included Morristown and Holy Name Medical Centers and Valley Hospital. It ultimately switched to rapid-response mode, suspending production until the need for PPE in New Jersey should rise again. n

Above: Parth Agrawal models The CommonHealth Project’s face shield.

Daniel Brateris (right), director of experiential learning at NJIT’s Newark College of Engineering, tries on a face shield that was designed and fabricated in the Makerspace at NJIT, while Justin Suriano, Makerspace manager, looks on.

NJIT Designers Fabricate Shields

After consulting with emergency room physicians on specifications, a team in the Makerspace at NJIT designed and manufactured a prototype of a face shield for use by various emergency workers. The front of the mask is a long piece of clear polycarbonate plastic, while the frame is made from HDPE plastic — the material used in plastic milk bottles — which pathogens have difficulty clinging to. The shield covers most of the face and is held in place by a simple strap. It can withstand even industrial-grade cleansers.

Daniel Brateris, director of experiential learning at NJIT’s Newark College of Engineering (NCE), said the goal was to build something as cleanly as possible that is easily sanitized and reusable. Cutting the masks with lasers from sheets of plastic, rather than 3D-printing them, allowed the effort to avoid the little cavities that develop when objects are built up layer by layer.

NCE Dean Moshe Kam noted that the university started to work on designs and make prototypes in anticipation of a steady clip of requests for supplies. n

NJIT Physics Team Provides Free Novel Swab Design

Ateam of physicists from NJIT’s Additive Manufacturing Lab (AddLab) developed a novel test swab that can be 3D-printed using inexpensive, widely available materials and speedily assembled in a range of fabrication settings. To augment the nation’s testing capabilities, the inventors made the swab’s design publicly available to large and small manufacturers, free of licensing fees, during the COVID-19 emergency.

The developers — AddLab’s director, John Federici, and senior additive manufacturing technician, Samuel Gatley, and Nicholas Warholak ’19, a technician and designer for the team — committed to the Open COVID Pledge and posted the design on the National Institutes of Health’s 3D Print Exchange website, which provides technology related to biomedical science that is readily compatible with 3D printers.

The typical swab is a 7-inch stick with synthetic material, such as rayon or dacron, attached to the swabbing end. After the sample is taken from the nose or throat, the swab is cut off, preserved in solution and then tested with a chemical called trizol that recovers RNA from the virus. The AddLab swab, by contrast, consists of two interlocking arms that work together, like forceps, to grip the swabbing material. By sliding the two arms against each other, the device can eject the sample, depositing it into a vial with no need to handle it. The swab is intended for immediate use to detect COVID-19 infections, but can be deployed in the future to detect a range of pathogens in pandemic hot spots around the globe, since it can be fabricated locally using inexpensive 3D-printing technology from a design that is downloaded either from the cloud or a website, avoiding the logistical problems of shipping medical supplies. The plastic forceps can be sterilized and reused. n

COVID-19

A team of environmental engineers meets online to quickly develop a new way to track SARS-CoV-2 that combines statistical methods with models that incorporate environmental parameters.

NJIT Engineers Build a New Model for Tracking

Ateam of environmental engineers at NJIT has developed a new way to track the spread of SARS-CoV-2, the novel coronavirus, by combining advanced statistical methods with models that incorporate environmental conditions, such as wind speed, temperature and social distancing. Michel Boufadel, director of NJIT’s Center for Natural Resources, and Xiaolong Geng, a research assistant professor of environmental engineering, were co-principal investigators of the project, funded by a National Science Foundation RAPID (Rapid Response Research) grant.

They were joined by graduate students Firas Gerges, a Ph.D. candidate in computer science who handled data sets obtained from various counties in the U.S., and Meghana Parameswarappa Jayalakshmamma, a master’s student in environmental engineering who worked with three undergraduates from NJIT’s Albert Dorman Honors College to investigate the virus’s behavior under varying environmental conditions. Holly McCann, now a third-year chemical engineering major on the team, conducted literature searches to better understand the virus’s physical characteristics, such as its susceptibility to high temperatures and its viability on surfaces and in drops of water.

Using data from the five boroughs of New York City and Bergen, Essex and Union counties in northern New Jersey, along with information from officials in all of these locations about actions they have taken to reduce infections, the team aims to pin down critical points, as in subways and grocery stores, where infections accelerate and suggest ways to modulate the spread. They have also analyzed massive amounts of national and international data sets using the latest techniques adopted in big data.

Following months of study, the researchers have shown that existing epidemiological models would need to be combined with a fractal (patterns that repeat across different scales) framework to better capture spikes in cases. On the ground, they have determined that supermarket configurations with narrow aisles with many display shelves reduce the virus-laden particles in the air. n

The consortium’s mobile medical care unit.

NJ Consortium Develops Mobile Medical Care Unit

In response to the extreme challenges to clinical capacity posed by the COVID-19 pandemic, NJIT, University Hospital in Newark and The Tuchman Foundation collaborated on the development of modular, mobile medical care facilities to be deployed to areas of surging disease outbreaks and other disasters, as well as to regions that lack health care infrastructure. The modules are fabricated from 40-foot-long repurposed shipping containers. They were tested in July for their effectiveness as triage centers in a series of staged patient-care simulations conducted by University Hospital.

The units include customizable internal environments that can be configured for various medical needs, including clinical point-of-care services and the testing and treatment of communicable and noncommunicable diseases. They are easily transportable for rapid deployment and can be staged horizontally to create larger clinical field operations sites with effective patient separation and management.

The partners contributed their respective expertise. NJIT provided architectural design, management and technological know-how; Julio Garcia Figueroa, an architect and university lecturer in NJIT’s Hillier College of Architecture and Design, was the principal designer, and officials at NJIT’s Martin Tuchman School of Management oversaw project management. University Hospital, the state’s only public

University Lecturer Catherine Siemann conducts her Honors Humanities class with students attending either in person or, via the back-wall screen, from a virtual location.

Strategy for Instruction

To complete the spring 2020 semester as scheduled, NJIT immediately drew upon its technological resources and know-how to provide a virtual learning experience for its 11,000+ students. The Digital Learning and Technology Support team at NJIT helped prepare faculty to teach online effectively and assisted students who lacked the means to engage. Over 150 document cameras, tablet laptops and drawing tablets were distributed to faculty, and dozens of computers were delivered to students in need of virtual access to their classes. Additionally, more than 6,700 Webex sessions were held and nearly 2,000 videos were created through Kaltura, a platform enabling live and on-demand video presentations.

Making modifications to the spring semester would turn out to be just the start of a more than six-month-long undertaking, to not only finish the past academic year but also ready for the next one. A key decision was to implement converged learning together with traditional online instruction. Converged learning, pioneered by NJIT since 2013, essentially breaks down the distinction between face-to-face and remote learning, with students attending the same class at the same time either in person or virtually. With this model, students have the same educational experience regardless of their physical location, and professors can see and interact with all attendees in real time. More than 7,000 students registered for at least one or more converged courses for the fall semester, and utilization of Webex and Kaltura increased, with upward of 163,800 sessions and more than 31,800 uploaded videos, respectively, between March and November 2020.

As for classroom occupancy, no more than 18 students are enrolled in any inperson course, versus the usual 30. Of this reduced group, only nine students at a time are permitted to attend in person, with the other half of the class participating remotely. Inside the classrooms, other measures are being taken to ensure the safety of students and faculty, including designated seating to facilitate social distancing, sanitization of seats and desks after every use and increased air exchange in buildings. Additionally, plexiglass screens have been installed as an extra physical barrier between students and instructors. n

hospital and northern New Jersey’s only Level-1 trauma center, was responsible for, among other aspects, input and feedback on the units’ internal configurations, clinical use and regulatory requirements; the clinical team running the simulations — physicians, nurses, technicians and infrastructure support personnel — assessed the efficacy of workflows in the modules in order to continuously refine them. And the Kingston, N.J.-based Tuchman Foundation, established by Martin Tuchman ’62, chairman of the foundation, CEO of the Tuchman Group and an engineering alumnus, supplied his company’s deep experience in shipping and logistics; the foundation, a nonprofit corporation that supports research on health care, including diseases and cures, provided initial funding to develop the prototype.

The group’s phase-1 prototype, constructed by Integrated Industries Corp in Woodbridge, N.J., focused on simple health care provisioning, including initial COVID-19 point-of-care examination and testing. Last semester, it was moved to the NJIT campus to serve as a testing hub for students, faculty and staff. NJIT and the foundation are now collaborating with RWJBarnabas Health, which placed four units at its hospital in Hamilton, N.J., for COVID-19 testing of patients, workers and community first-responders. n

U.S. Senator Cory Booker (fifth from left) joins members of the New Jersey consortium that developed a mobile medical care unit, including NJIT, University Hospital in Newark and The Tuchman Foundation.