Answering the Call

“What if,” “why does,” “how can”—WPI is all about questions and how to answer them. The university’s closing its doors in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic back in March 2020 sparked dozens more, with one in particular quickly becoming the most prevalent: “How can I help?”

For Kristin Boudreau, professor of humanities and arts, the answer came—appropriately enough—in the form of another question.

“[Professor of biology and biotechnology] Tanja Dominko texted me and asked if I knew how to sew and would I lead an effort to make face masks,” Boudreau says. Dominko’s commitment to helping and getting work done (and her complete confidence in the fact that Boudreau could help) spurred her to say, “Yes.”

Boudreau put out a call on WPI’s faculty/staff email listserv, began researching peer-reviewed, credible information on making safe and effective homemade masks for healthcare workers, and created a Facebook group, which quickly grew to more than 200 members.

“Everyone stepped up,” she says. “We were sewing all the time. People would leave sewing machines and supplies on my porch; I would drive to other towns to pick them up or drop them off … everyone was so selfless in all their efforts.”

While Boudreau’s porch served as the physical presence for the group’s efforts, a virtual one was also needed. Enter Ryan Meadows, director of pre-collegiate outreach programs ad interim: she took on the responsibility of not only running the Facebook group, but contributing to mask-making herself.

Meadows and her family and friends (many of whom had never sewed before) were quick to create an assembly line of sorts—one friend who didn’t sew washed and cut fabric and delivered it to Meadows’s home. Meadows assembled the masks, inserting a nose piece in each. Then she and her family sewed it all together, eventually producing about 1,500 masks.

“We were learning as we sewed, making masks, and helping save lives,” she says. “It was surreal … but the community needed it, and it was something we could help with. We had the resources, we had people who cared, and we did it.”

The handmade masks were not the only personal protective equipment WPI sent out into the community. In an effort coordinated by Dominko, Glenn Gaudette, at the time a professor of biomedical engineering, and Dan Sarachick, director of environmental health and safety, the university scoured its storage rooms and supply closets and packed up multiple pallets of supplies, mostly from WPI’s research labs: more than 39,000 nitrile and latex gloves, more than 800 surgical masks, 700 surgical caps, 41 protective gowns, 200 chemical protective suits, and 4,000 cotton-tipped swabs, among other items. The pallets were delivered to UMass Memorial Medical Center and the Massachusetts Emergency Management Agency.

Katie Bilotta, director of community relations, who’d joined WPI only a few months prior to the pandemic, had already worked with WPI’s Government and Community Relations team to orchestrate other efforts, like collecting and donating surplus rolls of toilet paper from now-empty campus buildings. She coordinated hundreds of face mask ordering and drop-off efforts with local organizations, while Chris Bellerive, senior operations manager in WPI’s Biomanufacturing Education and Training Center, joined Boudreau every day for five months to sterilize masks so recipients would be confident they wouldn’t import COVID-19 into their facilities.

The result? Over 7,000 masks were made and delivered to homeless shelters, medical clinics, drug rehab treatment centers, assisted living communities, and hospitals in and around Worcester. “There were so many in the city putting their own lives on the line,” Boudreau says. “Knowing that they didn’t have the protective gear they needed and that we could help them with that kept us going.”

“The images of a mother waving from a window at Great Brook Valley after receiving a package of three masks for her family,” Bilotta says, “the smile from a nurse at a local nursing home when a box of masks was being delivered to the reception desk, the security guard opening the door for me at Family Health Center for its monthly delivery of masks to disseminate to their patients … they’ll be forever emblazoned in my mind.”

The urgent need for personal protective equipment (PPE) didn’t stop there, and neither did the WPI community. Mitra Anand, makerspace advanced technology and prototyping specialist in the Department of Innovation and Entrepreneurship, and Adam Sears, director of Innovation Studio technical operations, felt the same drive to help as did Boudreau and her team.

After speaking with Donna Levin, then the executive director of innovation and entrepreneurship, and with encouragement and support from Erica Stults, application scientist in Academic and Research Computing, Anand and Sears set to prototyping 3D-printed face shields. They worked with local groups of physicians, doctors, and nurses to get their input on requirements and feedback before focusing on a specific design, one approved by the National Institutes of Health.

Then, in true WPI fashion, they hit the ground running. Together with other members of the Innovation and Entrepreneurship and Information Technology teams, they crafted more than 1,200 face shields for local hospitals, nursing homes, and clinics, as well as more than 300 for WPI faculty, TAs, police officers, and other support staff on campus. Bilotta says her office distributed 1,000 of the 3-D face shields to local organizations.

Once mass manufacturers caught up to the demand around June 2020, Anand and Sears pivoted their efforts to helping others gain the skills needed to supply their own communities with face shields. Through the COVID Response for Africa program, hosted through the Provost’s Office, WPI sent 3D printers to university partners in Africa, and Anand and Sears hosted virtual workshops focusing on a range of design and project consultations.

“Since there wasn’t a demand locally,” Anand says, “the best thing we could do going forward was to empower others and help them make a difference in their communities.”

The team followed up on these global efforts in March 2021, with new partners and faculty from across Africa attending advanced workshops where Anand and Sears demonstrated how to reduce print times and use fewer materials while creating the same impact, and sharing other cost-cutting measures across similar initiatives.

“It felt good to use our resources to help our community and others in need,” Sears says, adding the team felt lucky to have had access to such equipment and resources. “It seemed a shame to leave [the printers] sitting by not helping. It felt really good to give back and make an impact outside our lab walls.”

Anand agrees, adding, “It was a challenging journey for us, with lots of learning on the fly and going from there, but every bit of effort we put in was worth it to see our work in the hands of people who needed it.”

In addition to the virtual efforts made by Anand and Sears, WPI expanded its longtime Math and Science for Sub-Saharan Africa initiative in April 2020. This expansion arranged for 3D printers and other materials to be sent to Nigeria, Rwanda, Niger, The Gambia, Mauritius, and Ghana, facilitating the manufacturing of masks, face shields, and parts for simple automated ventilators. Teams in those countries also had access to online training modules and other open-source design plans.

“It is wonderful to see African institutions and WPI working together to use and adapt technology to meet African needs,” said Sajitha Bashir, World Bank adviser to the education global director on science, technology, and innovation, in a 2020 press release. “The impact of this program to address timely and critical issues speaks to the strong motivation to build the technical-scientific capability of Africa.”

While many in the WPI community were putting PPE in the hands of those on the front lines, others focused on a different kind of necessity: care packages and handwritten notes and cards. These efforts provided a much-needed touch of humanity during a time when touch itself was scarce.

Members of the InterVarsity Christian Fellowship kicked things off by partnering with Grace Presbyterian Church to create care packages for their peers who were in isolation and quarantine due to COVID-19. InterVarsity members came up with a list of items for students—from puzzles and stuffed animals to bags of tea and jars of homemade honey. Members of the congregation pitched in to purchase items before the care packages were assembled and dropped off at the Student Development and Counseling Center, where they were then safely distributed to affected students.

“We wanted to be a blessing to those around us, and with the recent increase in cases, we saw that there was an immediate opportunity to help and encourage our isolated peers,” InterVarsity Christian Fellowship member Joseph Yuen ’21 said in a December 2020 interview in The Herd, WPI’s digital news platform.

A March 2021 card-writing campaign led by Bilotta and Matt Foster, associate director of residential services, in partnership with Elder Services of the Worcester Area (ESWA), was aimed at letting local Meals on Wheels recipients know they were not alone. Inspired by a past ESWA campaign in which she and her husband participated, Bilotta brought the project to Foster, who shared it with residential students, the Student Activities Office, and the entire WPI community. All in all, about 130 participants made over 800 cards.

“It’s about giving to give,” says Bilotta, who used her coordination skills not only for mask orders and delivery, but for the notes and cards as well, “and hoping that what you do brings a smile to somebody’s face on the other side.”

Whether someone received a face mask, a face shield, a care package, or a card from a member of the WPI community, it’s safe to say that those smiles were wide.