Source: Daily Breeze
Cal State Dominguez Hills had an empty campus, vacant labs and plenty of students who were laid off because of the coronavirus pandemic.
So Dr. Kamal Hamdan, the university’s Director for the Center for Innovation in STEM Education, had an idea. Why not put some of those students and the unused lab equipment to work to create face shields for health care providers?
“I kept hearing there was a huge need for face shields,” he said Saturday, April 11. “So I thought, ‘We have a great workforce in our students, and we have the best technology. Why can’t we repurpose that?’”
So, for the past two weeks, Hamdan and about 25 students have been at work – first to create face shield prototypes, then to produce as many as possible. Using the equipment in the university’s Fabrication Lab, which includes 3D printers and lasers, the team has so far been able to make 1,500 face shields.
The only problem now is finding a place to donate them.
Hamdan has reached out to local hospitals and hasn’t yet heard back. He visited the state’s website for donating personal protective equipment and was told officials would try to connect him with hospitals in need. But nothing yet.
“My worry is, what if that takes a month or two?” Hamdan said. “We want to help much sooner than that.”
So Hamdan is on the lookout for hospitals who may be in need of face shields.
Ideally, he said, if a hospital has the funding, it would be good to be able to hire more students – who are all working and being paid part-time for their efforts – to produce even more masks.
