Five UC Berkeley BESTies (Mechanical Engineering Ph.D. graduates – Jessica Granderson, Catherine Newman and Jaspal Sandhu – and undergraduate researchers – Resham Khanna in Cognitive Science & Psychology and Akhil Padmanabha in Mechanical Engineering) are producing face shields for Bay Area county hospitals and emergency response systems, to meet our local healthcare professionals’ need for personal protective equipment as we ramp up to the COVID-19 surge.
True to their design roots, they’ve taken a solid design approach, and iterated the design with target recipients at Highland Hospital and other local, public systems. They have delivered over 2500 shields to Highland Hospital, and built up a great relationship with the logistics, infection control, and nursing teams. By all counts their design is preferred and offers several advantages over other donated PPE that may not really end up getting used by nurses in the higher risk contexts.
