Together with a small team of Georgia Tech faculty and students, Kentez Craig spent the past 2 months working to design and build critical protective gear and medical equipment to help first responders battle COVID-19.
When Kentez Craig was a teenager, he was riding in the car with his father one day when they came upon a vehicle on fire along the side of the road. Craig’s dad, a paramedic, pulled the car to a stop and rushed out to help.
It was the kind of act that didn’t surprise Craig. He grew up listening to his parents, both paramedics, tell stories of responding to burning buildings and crushed cars. They instilled in him the importance of serving one’s community and never panicking in a crisis. Seven years later, Craig’s dad, Kenneth, is working as an emergency room paramedic, now on the front lines of thein Georgia. Craig is a graduate student at Georgia Tech’s school of mechanical engineering. Watching the pandemic ravage Atlanta, Craig said his parents’ devotion to public service inspired him to take action. Together with a small team of Georgia Tech faculty and students, he has spent the past two months working to design and build critical protective gear and medical equipment to help first responders battle COVID-19. “I saw nothing better I could do to give back to people like my mom, my dad — who have been working in emergency services — and first responders on the real front lines of this,” Craig told NBC News.Over the past few weeks, Craig’s team has provided thousands of face shields to medical facilities across the country, as well as roughly 200 intubation boxes, a protective barrier that shields health care workers from respiratory droplets when intubating patients, to Atlanta-area hospitals. And the face shield design they created has been used to produce nearly 2 million of them. “If I had fireworks, I would have set them off,” said Kari Love, program director for infection prevention at Emory Healthcare, recalling its first delivery of face shields created at Georgia Tech. “It was an amazing feeling to see the smiles on the faces of the Emory staff who were receiving them.”The project began in mid-March as Atlanta was becoming a COVID-19 hot spot. An email circulated around Georgia Tech faculty members: What could they do to help? Chris Saldana, an associate professor of mechanical engineering at Georgia Tech, connected with an Emory Healthcare staff member through a mutual colleague, and they discussed what personal protective equipment the hospital needed. The most pressing need: face shields, plastic coverings that protect health care workers from respiratory droplets and extend the life of N95 masks. “When we were talking with health care workers, we realized that the need was in the order of millions, and the need was in the order of weeks, if not days,” Saldana said. After talking with Love and other health care professionals, Saldana gathered a team of Georgia Tech faculty members and student volunteers to get to work on a design for a face shield that could be built quickly but also easily mass produced to help with the national supply. “Being a university, we’re very nimble. We can jump on the machines fairly quickly and actually produce components,” Saldana said. Georgia Tech is home to one of the most robust student-run engineering makerspaces in the country, the Flowers Invention Studio, which Craig helps run during the school year. When Craig heard Saldana was looking to open the studio to build face shields, he immediately emailed Saldana that he wanted to be involved. Together, over the course of three days, the team worked around the clock to produce a face shield using a laser cutter and water jet cutter. Craig said the days were long but the team’s camaraderie powered them through.Sign Up
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