Assistant Professor Saad Bhamla is featured in a New York Times video showing how a wide range of innovators, from engineers to doctors to even high school students, are mobilizing to meet the critical need for personal protective gear (PPE) in the face of the Coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak across the world.

Georgia Tech researchers are among the teams who are racing to “improvise ventilators, face shields, respirators, surgical gowns, disinfectant wipes, and other healthcare gear to help the hundreds of thousands of people expected to swamp hospitals with waves of critical COVID-19 illness over the next several weeks,” according to a Georgia Tech News Center article also featuring Bhamla.

Many researchers around the globe are connecting through online social messaging platforms such as Slack, crowd-sourcing for a variety of PPE, notes The New York Times feature.

Bhamla, a faculty member in Georgia Tech’s School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, says in the video, “My lab works in the area of frugal science, and we build low-cost tools for resource-limited areas. And now I realize, I don’t have to go that far. It’s in my backyard. We need it here now.”

The video shows Bhamla demonstrating prototypes of face shields made from plastic purchased at an art store, a material similar to what you could cut from a soda bottle, he says.

Among Georgia Tech Coronavirus team member, Samuel Graham (professor and chair of the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering) notes in the video that he and his colleagues are working with manufacturers to move designs made with 3D printing or laser cutters to large-scale production. “One of the neat things we’ve done is not only the design –– proving you can make it rapidly – but also trying to secure the entire supply chain,” Graham says.

Bhamla concludes the video on a personal note, saying that he can’t stop working on this, because one day he’ll need to tell his newborn baby boy “what we did when society needed us.”

Related Content: Read about Bhamla's "frugal-science" development of an ultra low-cost hearing aid.