(soothing, upbeat music)
- [John] For McMaster
University, I'm John Preston.
And you're listening to "Big
Ideas for a Changing World."
In this series, you'll
hear from researchers
from McMaster's faculty
of engineering and beyond
who are creating innovative solutions
to our world's greatest challenges.
I have the chance to see these
solutions up close every day
as the faculty's Associate Dean
for research and external relations.
The challenge we'll explore
today is the urgent need
for personal protective equipment or PPE.
On March 11, 2020, the
World Health Organization
declared the COVID-19 outbreak a pandemic.
Since then a worldwide shortage of PPE
has put healthcare workers' lives at risk
as the very items that protect
them while they care for us
were in short supply.
As you'll hear from one of our guests,
Dr. Alison Fox-Robichaud,
there was at one point only
a week's worth of masks
for healthcare professionals
in one Hamilton hospital.
The need for a local
solution was critical.
That's when a team of
engineers committed to working
alongside Alison and our colleagues
in the faculty of health science
and Hamilton Health Sciences.
You'll hear from Ravi Selvaganapathy
from the faculty of
engineering who spearheaded
this effort and is now
leading center of excellence
in personal protective equipment
and materials at McMaster.
But with me today, I
have Ravi Selvaganapathy
and Alison Fox-Robichaud.
I'm going to ask each of
those to introduce themselves.
Alison, could we start with you?
Could you tell us about
yourself and your role?
- [Alison] Good afternoon, everyone.
I'm Alison Fox-Robichaud.
I'm a critical care physician,
an ICU physician in my clinical life,
a professor in the department of medicine,
faculty of health sciences at McMaster.
And my research extends is
about a disease called sepsis,
but I also have a hospital appointment
where I'm director of medical education.
So I oversee all of the
medical students and residents
coming into Hamilton Health Sciences.
So I have a couple of roles
and as Ravi was just mentioning
my research sepsis
I am the scientific director
of a new CIHR-funded network
that we're calling Sepsis Canada
that has a hundred and 90 scientists,
but Ravi and I have a
longstanding relationship
that's been almost seven years now,
including a CHERT grant
that we've held together
to develop a point of care device.
- [John] Okay. And Ravi,
could you tell us a
little bit about yourself?
- [Ravi] Yeah. So thank
you for joining everybody.
I'm Ravi Selvaganapathy.
I'm a professor in mechanical engineering,
and I'm an associate member in the school
of biomedical engineering as well.
My research interests are primarily
in microfabrication and microfluidics,
so application of
miniaturization technology
in handling small volumes
of fluid with application
in things like diagnostics,
discovery of new drugs,
delivery of drugs,
artificial organs, and so on.
So it's very different
from what we are going
to talk about today.
And I've been sort of,
like Alison mentioned,
collaborating with her
over the past seven years
or so in developing devices for sepsis.
And that to some extent was
important in the genesis
of this work and collaboration.
- [John] Absolutely.
So we won't be talking about
miniaturized microfluidic
devices or sepsis very much
during the remainder of this program.
What we are going to talk about
are the efforts to produce
personal protective equipment
for frontline healthcare workers,
but also for others and how
that's led to a rich and robust
program working with Canadian industry
to develop a Canadian supply
chain for these items.
But I think the first point
is to just maybe begin
at the beginning and can each
of you try to take us back
to the very early days of when COVID-19
was beginning to become an issue
both within the world and
then later within Canada,
and maybe tell us about how
this collaborative effort came
about to work on something
that was very different
from what you were doing pre-COVID?
- [Alison] So if you
recall way back in March
the WHO declared a
pandemic somewhere around,
I think it was the 9th or 10th,
maybe it was a couple of days later.
And because this pandemic
started in China, we have been,
as many people are in the world,
reliant on China for supplying us
personal protective equipment,
and with the declaration of
the pandemic and the shutdown
in China that supply
chain was interrupted.
And so on March 19th, after
some meetings in the hospital,
I sent an email to Ravi
and to my Associate Dean of
Research, Jonathan Bramson
in the faculty of health sciences
and said maybe the Beam facility,
'cause I was just thinking
outside of the box
could help us produce PPE
because we're gonna have
a supply chain issue.
And that started a fury
of emails on March 19th
with John getting included
and a bunch of other people
to start to look at the problem
and what the faculty of
engineering could do to help us.
- [Ravi] Yeah, I recall
a similar kind of thing
in the sense that the email
from Alison came out of the blue,
and it started at the cog
wheels turning, right?
And initially our ideas were,
could we look at using the
manufacturing capability
within engineering to
try to get this done?
And then quickly we
realized that the magnitude
of the problem was fairly large enough
that we couldn't necessarily just use
engineering capability,
we need to reach out.
And that's when it sort of
became a bigger, bigger effort.
And the other important thing was
to bring together the team, right?
So no single individual
can do all of these things,
and in engineering, the
most impressive feature
was this team-building exercise.
And that then led to the
kind of response that we saw.
- [John] So just to go
back to those times,
I remember them as well.
And initially we were
collecting masks and respirators
that we had available
already in engineering
and packaging them up
to take them over to,
but I don't know how many
days' supply that was
or how many hours supply.
But I remember being quite taken aback
when I was told that, you know,
thousands of masks and
respirators were required each day
locally in Hamilton at
Hamilton Health Science
and at Saint Joe's each,
that the idea that we would
somehow be handcrafting
masks was a little bit naive
on our part.
So Ravi, you mentioned the
team-building exercise.
Can you give a sense of
how long it took to get
a functional team together
and what were sort of
the key elements of that?
- [Ravi] It didn't take very long.
I mean, compared to the scale
that we used to operate in research.
I mean, I remember
getting a graduate student
would take several months
and processing all the paperwork.
And so here, what we had luckily for us
was the university was in shutdown.
Research was all stopped.
And therefore there was a
number of faculty members
and students and technical staff
in machine shops and so on,
who did not necessarily have
their regular day-to-day duties
and were also very extremely
eager to contribute.
So there was an initial
team of about three,
four or five faculty members
and the associated students
that were put together very
quickly and then rapidly,
it grew into a size of about
20 plus faculty members
and 40 plus students and research staff
involved in the effort
and making personal protective equipment.
And I think there was a sort
of a slightly lesser but equal
number of people involved
in other aspects of response
to COVID-19 work within engineering.
So this was a significant
fraction of people
in engineering who got involved.
And I was amazed by the amount
of contribution that people
were willing to make voluntarily, right?
So there was a very palpable
eagerness to contribute
to the society as a collective effort.
And that is something
that I'm really proud of
from engineering.
- [John] Alison, can you talk about,
I'm assuming that as this happened
and after this initial email that launched
all of this activity you must've taken on,
well, I know you took
on additional activities
within the hospital.
Can you maybe describe how
your day to day activities
changed as COVID was starting
to become an issue within Hamilton?
- [Alison] So for whatever reason,
I had a bit of block where I was.
Again, the lab was being shut down.
My clinical research was being shut down,
and I didn't have any clinical time.
So I spent my days between
meetings at the hospital
to ramp up our pandemic planning
and then making the connections
to the engineering faculty
to be able to move all of this forward.
What I did was help make some connections
in their engineering faculty
who had other connections
and probably the biggest
one was to the manager
who was in charge of the PPE supply.
So Brian Harachuck had been tasked
at the hospital level with
looking at our supply chain
and he became the hospital side,
and he and a couple of other people
who are involved with N-95
testing and other things
became part of this team
from the hospital side.
We've added some other
people subsequently.
And Myrna Dolovich at Saint Joe's.
So we brought Saint Joe's into the loop
and that started new collaborations,
but my days during that
sort of initial lockdown,
everybody stay at home,
whereas a lot of sort of more
cloak and dagger almost right,
because by that point we
started to get a bunch of masks,
and we started really
with the masks project.
We need facial masks and in the hospital,
this was a huge moving target for us.
What mask should we use?
How much should we wear them?
And even at the beginning,
we weren't wearing masks all
the time in the hospital.
We had way back with SARS,
almost a decade before,
but we hadn't gotten to the point
where everybody was wearing
and the literature had
changed a little bit.
And we didn't know this virus as well,
so we weren't wearing masks,
but we knew we might get to that point
as the pandemic continued to spread.
And we weren't quite sure
what was gonna happen in Hamilton
and was it gonna look like China?
And so we started to look at
the masks and at this point,
Dr. Preston starts delivering
masks to my doorstep
(laughter)
and it's coming from unusual places.
We could talk a little bit
about some of those unusual places,
but it's the community within
sort of the region in Hamilton
that actually stepped up
to the mass production
and what we did at the university
and how we sort of re-change from,
are we going to produce this,
is how are we going to test this?
Because it was clear that we didn't have,
as we learned, the capacity
in our area to test the masks
to the standards for which
we were expecting them
to be used for healthcare workers.
And just for the students,
particularly a mask is
not a mask is not a mask.
And so the engineers rapidly learned a lot
about what it took to make
a hospital grade mask, particularly.
- [John] Yeah, that would be a fascinating
to go back to those early days
and some of the naive statements
that might've been made.
Along with Ravi, I'm not only proud
of people's willingness to step up,
I'm a little amazed at how
quickly they became sophisticated
in terms of their appreciation
of how masks work.
Ravi, do you maybe want to go
into a little bit more detail on that?
Like who within McMaster
had preexisting knowledge
that could be brought to bear onto this?
And can you tell us how maybe just some
of those pieces maybe fit together?
- [Ravi] Yeah, masks and
other protective equipment,
like face shields, for example,
ventilators were another sort
of early concern and interest,
and we did some development there.
So all of these things
were to some extent,
new to all of us, right?
So there were bits and pieces of expertise
that we could draw on.
And this, again, for the students
is one of the key features
of the university education, right?
So unlike skills-based training,
which gives you very specific
training on very specific
pieces of equipment or
technology or whatnot,
university education is more broad based.
We look at fundamental
principles and so on.
So whatever we apply in some area,
we could use that knowledge
and understanding and expertise
into some equivalent other area,
if the problems are very similar, right?
So in some senses,
the masks and the filtration
that we do to some extent is
similar to what we do in other
research, say, for example,
in terms of water
filtration, for instance,
or in terms of the surfaces
and dealing with surfaces
versus fluid numbers
and things of that sort.
So we could apply somewhat
similar principles,
but it took a lot of new learning.
And it took a lot of surprising directions
because it was not purely
academic in nature.
It was also in terms of managing
this rapidly disintegrating
supply chains, right?
So what we quickly realized
was the filter material
that goes into the mask is the key piece
that is important if we want
to produce medical grade masks.
And that supply chain was
rapidly disintegrating,
and there was no quality place
to actually get that tested.
And so what we then did was
to come up with a game plan
that will, in the event
of a crisis, support
Hamilton Health Sciences by providing
sufficient supply of masks.
So this was sort of our
worst case scenario planning
for this purpose.
And we identified that
testing is very crucial.
So we need to build good testing setup.
And the faculty of
engineering was generous
with putting in that initial seed funding
to build that infrastructure.
And we brought in peoples
in surprising places.
So for example, our head of
the mechanical engineering
machine shop doing his master's
about like 15 years ago,
had apparently worked on
very similar setups, right?
And therefore this was a fantastic find.
And he was able to put together
these setups fairly rapidly in order
to get those masks tested.
And once we had that capability,
we became then a resource
center to the local companies
who were eager to seek Canadian
testing for these masks.
- [John] Alison you mentioned about,
I'll call it uncertainty and
how the shifting framework
of what was understood
about both the virus itself,
but also about appropriate treatments
and protective measures.
Can you maybe give us a sense
of what it was like in those days,
and also maybe comment on
how serious was the shortage
of personal protective equipment.
How far out did you have supply for?
- [Alison] So there were a
point where some of the masks
that we would normally wear,
we had less than a week's supply.
So if we had had any more cases
coming or the supply chain
had totally broken down,
we would have not been able
to do our usual care with a mask.
And there was a rapid
change in the hospital.
So it went from, we don't wear
masks routinely for anything,
except for doing a procedure to everybody
in the emergency department,
wanting to have a mask
on anytime somebody came through
the emergency department door
and educators trying to figure out
what is the best standard of what masks
we should be using to, okay,
now we're just gonna wear masks in the ICU
and the emergency department
to now everybody in the
hospital is gonna wear masks.
Now visitors are gonna wear masks
and it's sort of progressed like that.
So you can imagine our supply chain
to now you're gonna wear masks,
but you're not gonna change
it and take it off and on.
You're gonna have to wear a mask all day.
And what mask are you going to wear?
So are you gonna wear an unrated mask
and the regular sort of
hospital mask that you see
has three levels and those have to do
with their ability to filtrate.
And so who's gonna wear what level mask,
depending on whether you're patient-facing
or not patient-facing.
So it was this huge shift and every day,
you'd go to the educators,
"Oh, and this has changed,
"and we've decided we're gonna wear this."
And now this group is
gonna have to wear masks,
so it was totally confusing, you know,
even for me at the leadership position,
it was confusing for the frontline staff
because the messages were
changing so frequently.
And that was just in the hospital.
And now, as you started
to hear in the media,
it was worse in particularly
the retirement homes,
including the long-term care facilities
who were supposed to have a pandemic plan,
but many of them didn't have it
to the extent that they needed to.
- [John] Yeah, I think that's something
it's hard to convey to the public.
Just how great the challenge of working
in that kind of an
environment day after day.
Ravi, I think on the engineering side,
maybe the risks weren't the
same because we weren't dealing
with infected patients,
but maybe you can comment at the time
when we got started, when
you really started assembling
your team and bringing them together,
how certain were you that
you were going to be able
contribute and actually
produce quality PPE?
- [Ravi] We weren't. (laughs)
So it was as dynamic as
Allison is describing,
except in the sense
that we were uncertain,
whether the efforts that we were making
would be of any use at all, right?
In the sense that the goalposts
were dynamically changing
as the crisis was evolving.
And we had to adapt from an
engineering perspective in terms
of the kinds of masks
that we want to develop,
as well as in the kinds of
materials that we want to deal
with, or the testing facilities.
From a planning perspective,
it has been pretty
constant in the sense that
what we have always thought
of is as the last stop measure
for Hamilton Health Sciences,
in case everything breaks down.
Right? So that was our purpose.
We would be really happy
if the capabilities
that we develop and so on
were not used at all, right,
because that would mean that Hamilton
as a whole survived fantastically well.
And so it wasn't very useful.
So that is sort of the
mentality that we took,
although it ended up that the
work that we did got a number
of companies involved
in making of the mask,
and therefore from a long-term
perspective, in terms of PPE,
Canada and Ontario has now more
of these companies producing
these masks and supplying to
hospital systems and so on.
And so supply chain has
been relatively relieved.
So the effort has outcomes,
but that was not the expectation
for as long as we've been
involved in this project.
And that way we were able to manage
expectations very easily.
- [John] Alison mentioned the
time when I dropped off masks
to her home, maintaining
physical distancing appropriately
during that time, so that
Alison could then take it
into the hospital setting for
testing and to get feedback,
which was particularly good.
Ravi, can you maybe
comment on how important
the feedback from the
staff, and of course,
some of that feedback,
maybe you can comment.
I mean, this is potentially
lifesaving equipment.
So you know, someone would assume comfort
would be a secondary consideration,
can you maybe comment on that take?
- [Ravi] Yeah. So I think the
comments are very valuable
and this goes back to this
design thinking philosophy
that as engineers we should
have is this constant feedback
from potential users of
whatever we are building,
whether it's a medical device
or a commercial product.
or whatever it is.
There is a mentality that
we often tend to think
from a technical perspective,
does it meet the technical
specifications and so on,
but then we often ignore
other things like the feedback
or the usability of it,
as well as the perspective
of comfort, wear, and so on
which often trumps right,
the use and helps propagate
the use of the devices
that we would be making.
So, feedback from Alison, for example,
in terms of the ability to use
and the scenarios that were
emerging in the hospital
in terms of how these PPE'S
were used really was crucial
not only for the engineering team,
but also for the companies
that we're working with
in designing suitable modifications
that could actually enable the users
of these pieces of equipment to wear them
comfortably better over
longer periods of time
without necessarily
causing discomfort, right?
So for example, breathability
is a very important concern,
which if we were not having
this feedback from Alison
and her team, we would
just simply think of it
as a pressure drop measurement, right?
And we would meet that specification.
We try to meet that specification,
but not necessarily lower
that significantly so that it
becomes much more comfortable for use
of the end user, right?
So a number is not just a number
as long as you don't visualize this
from the perspective of the end user,
then that number that carries
a different kind of weight.
And that is what we learned
as a team in this interaction
with a personal productive equipment.
- [John] All right. I wanna
change gears a little bit.
So we we've talked quite a bit
about the early days of
the pandemic and, you know,
laid the ground work for how it was going.
How have things evolved?
Alison, what's the biggest
challenge that you see right now
in terms of personal protective equipment?
What would you like to see coming out
of this collaboration with engineers?
- [Alison] Well, I think
the first thing we learned
was about our gaps in testing
for personal protective equipment,
particularly masks, the search
for who could do these tests,
and the fact that there
was only one center
in all of North America that could test
for the bacteria testing.
And it had to go to Utah.
And, you know, there was financial usury
out for lack of a better word in terms of
I'd get, almost call it
piracy to a certain extent,
to get the testing done that we needed to,
they wanted a lot of money to do it.
They were getting inundated with people
all across North America,
but it was really that gap.
And while I'm supportive of globalization
and supporting everybody else,
it absolutely brought
out where the gaps are
in supply chains when you're
in the middle of a pandemic
and a crisis.
But it also was highlighted, you know,
we are fortunate in
Hamilton that we haven't had
a New York City, that we've
been better off than, you know,
even our colleagues in
Toronto and Montreal
who've had it relatively, not
horrid, but rough by times.
But at the same time,
we need to think about our
global perspective in Canada
about how we might do better.
And as we've globalized, we
forgotten that, you know,
sometimes local manufacturing
is an important thing to have
when you hit a crisis
and things don't move.
- [John] So Ravi, is your transient group
that you brought together
in the matter of weeks,
are they gonna be able to help develop
this local capacity to create,
build personal protective equipment?
- [Ravi] Definitely.
So the interesting bit
of all of these efforts,
even though we went in
not knowing much about masks
and face shields and whatnot,
is that we could find
very interesting problems
in all of these things that
from an engineers are like nectar, right?
So in the sense that there
are material-related things
that we could do to improve
performance of these gears.
There are design-related aspects
that could be involved as well.
And so what we find is from
the perspective of engineering,
this could be an industry
that is worth to disrupting.
There's a lot of innovation
that could be brought in
and through innovation we
could support local industry.
So manufacturing in Canada
could be established in a way
that Canadian products
then tend to get viewed
as one of the more innovative
and reliable products.
And through that, you could have
potential market values, right?
And what we see also is several
avenues that our existing
research areas could
contribute and benefit
in this PPE innovation and development.
So for instance, we could integrate masks
with sensors that could
change color, for instance,
that can indicate presence
of toxic gases and whatnot.
So you can go beyond just the medical use.
There is requirements for
personal protective equipment
in a a number of areas like in mining,
in petroleum industries, for instance,
in firefighting and so on.
So that's the way that
we tend to view things
is that the initial effort that was put in
could then lead to
fundamental developments
in materials, manufacturing,
processes, design of devices,
not only in the medical
area, but in other areas.
And so in that context,
what we are thinking of doing,
and we've started this
effort is to establish
the Center for Protective
Equipment and Materials
that could then be as a
hub to collect companies
interested in this area,
enable a research and development program,
and then translate those
findings into products
that Canadian industry could
then put out to the world.
- [John] Okay. So for the
audience, McMaster has launched
a Center for Protective
Equipment and Materials
that Ravi Selvaganapathy is
the inaugural director of.
Ravi, can you tell me about,
you've described some of the activities,
but can you maybe highlight
some of the other things
that this center of excellence
is going to be able to achieve?
- [Ravi] Yeah, so the focus
of the center is again,
to look into innovation,
research and development
in the area of protective
equipment and materials.
There are six sort of
thematic research areas
that we are interested in.
The first one is design thinking
and design of these personal
protective equipment
to exactly what the users need.
So surprisingly, what we
found was many of these masks
were not originally designed
for medical applications,
but were repurposed for
medical applications.
And therefore there is
a lot of design elements
that we could incorporate
that make this technology
specific for medical applications,
specific for mining, specific
for industrial applications
and whatnot.
The other area that we're interested in
is in functional materials.
So materials is a very
strong suit for McMaster.
And we want to incorporate
many of these expertise
in materials in making
masks that are much superior
than current masks or
PPEs that are out there.
So for instance,
if you have masks which
are easily breathable,
but provide high levels of protection
against particle matter and
bacterial and viral matter,
and you can wear them for eight hours
without feeling dizzy for it, right?
So then of course that will be
a significant market for it.
So currently such a product doesn't exist.
That is a very important outcome,
and those outcomes are
mediated by new materials
that can be brought in.
They're also mediated by new
manufacturing methods that can
actually create these kinds of
filters using nanotechnology
and other interesting
research that is going on
in the university in a
cost effective manner.
So again, from the perspective
of a consumer product
it has to be cost effective,
it can not be like a medical device
costing thousands of dollars.
So balancing the cost performance
and the user benefit
of all of these things
is a classical engineering
tasks that the center
is bound to do.
The other a more longer term perspective
that we are also taking
is one of sustainability.
So sustainability is another
major theme for the university.
And what we find is that as more and more
masks and PPE's are
used, they're often made
from the source material is
petroleum products, right?
And then they're disposed of.
And you're increasingly finding
news articles where people
are saying that, well,
dumps are now being flooded
with PPE's or you're finding this
in the watershed and so on.
So this is going to become a persistent
and increasing problem as more usage
of these personal protective
equipments happen.
So what we want to do is to
use sustainable materials,
to make these things in a
cost effective manner as well,
so that they either biodegrade
or they're made from natural materials
like paper and other things.
So that is another theme.
And then the final theme is based on
the testing infrastructure
that we built up.
We would like to create new
standards that are again,
specific to the industries
that they apply for these
personal protective equipment.
So we want to work with
agencies like Health Canada,
Canadian Standards Association, and so on.
And we've reached out to them
in order to have our people,
students and faculty members involved
in creating Canadian standards,
which hopefully will set
global standards as well.
- [John] Okay. That's very ambitious.
Is there really a market
for all of these activities?
I mean, how many I know there is a number
of companies tried to
step forward to assist
during the height of the crisis.
How many companies are reaching out
to this center of excellence for help?
- [Ravi] We have so far helped more
than 50 companies in dealing with.
So there's been a number of companies
that have been interested
in setting up production
facilities both for the materials,
as well as for the personal
protective equipments themselves
or testing these products.
So we help all companies that
are interested and depending
on what their interest is,
we help them in various ways.
One could be just testing the
products that they're making.
The other could be helping
them with the design.
The third one could be
helping them with manufacture
of materials or modifying
existing materials they have.
So far, we have helped
more than 50 companies.
We have had continuing conversations
with at least 25 to 30 companies or so,
and I think these are the
companies that would end up
forming the core industrial
aspect of the center.
And what we are hoping to
do is to create a forum
in which they can come.
And these companies span
the entire supply chain
of manufacturing for the PPEs,
so that not only will they
find whatever research
and development we are doing
at the center interesting,
but they can have a conversation
between themselves in
order to find partnerships.
And that will create
network that is resilient
and will create an ecosystem of expertise
and interest in the local area
to sustain this as a long-term
industry for Ontario.
- [John] So Alison we're starting to see
that there is products being advertised
and to a certain extent available.
Is there really a need for
this local supply chain?
Are there any deficiencies in the product
that you're seeing available to you now?
- [Alison] Some of our
current supply chain
has been not to the same
quality that one would expect.
I went through a box of N-95 masks
last time I was on service
and ended up having four masks
that didn't even have elastics on them
at the bottom of that box.
So there was that sort of quality control.
The other thing is when you wear a mask
for up to 12 or 16 hours a day,
off for meals and drink
and everything else,
you get dehydrated, one.
But the second thing is that
those masks that were currently
used for someone who may
have any sort of allergies,
have been horrid.
My face itches at the end of the day.
So that oral based material
that's used to make
most of the common
surgical masks right now
is really bad for people with allergies.
And so some of the local
masks that we've been using
in fact, people have put them on and say,
"Hey, this doesn't make my face itch.
"At the end of the day, it's comfortable.
"I can breathe through it."
And we heard at our last masks
meeting that it's actually
going to be better to produce those masks
that are hypoallergenic, for example,
because we've got a whole
bunch of workers we have to pay
workman's comp to be off
because they can't wear
the masks in hospital.
So yes, appropriately produced masks
that meet modern standards
and deal with allergies
and face shapes and gender
related face shapes,
and people who want to have
beards and want to be able
to work in a hospital at the same time,
we should be able to produce a variety
of masks or face shields.
And we've done some innovative things
with face shields as well,
that they can work in
a hospital environment
and feel safe doing that.
- [John] I have a question
coming from one of the members
of the audience that asked the question
of what nontechnical nonacademic
skills have been essential
in terms of making this work?
Can you maybe give some
sense of how you make
this kind of rich collaboration?
- [Alison] So I would say I've
used my leadership training.
So I've had a lot of
formal leadership training,
and among that was how
do you engage others
and make connections?
And it has been the new
connections that we've made
and who do you tap on
to, and being curious,
that's another one of those big skills
of okay, we often think of
ourselves as curious anyway,
if we're in the sciences and STEM,
but really being curious
about what people's needs are
and how we're going to
be able to use that.
So those are two sort of
nontechnical skills in terms
of being open and innovative
and exploring what could be
because the innovation,
I think that, John,
that's the other thing,
the speed of which we have been innovating
for the past three months
has been unbelievable.
- Ravi, do you wanna maybe amplify that?
And I think you said something
earlier that struck me,
which is you had people working
literally around the clock,
hoping that the outcome
would never be needed.
How do you keep a group
brand new brew group brought
together motivated with
that kind of a mandate?
- [Ravi] Yeah, it's been a
enlightening journey, right,
in the sense that I wouldn't have thought
that that was possible as well,
but I think that is what
people are primed to do
if they have a higher purpose, right?
And that is what is important, right?
So far from an academic perspective,
we have our research projects and so on,
and we do projects which are impactful,
but impactful over the longer term.
Here we have a situation where the work
that we do can have an immediate impact
and that immediate impact is
felt in the local community.
And that has a very powerful
effect that enables people
or makes people want
to want to contribute.
And I think that is a key measure
that we probably should incorporate
into our student training more.
And that may be something where
the students look at making
not only sort of their research thesis,
but also have an impact project
on the side that they could
contribute to where they can see
that immediate result of this.
And I think that that
is the key motivation.
And what I would also do is
to second Alison's comment
in the sense that in my viewpoint,
there are two ways that we can view
our sort of contribution and efforts.
One is sort of the explorer mentality
and where what you're trying to do
is to seek new experiences.
And therefore that then becomes a journey,
then becomes sort of the important thing.
The other one is an
empire building mentality,
where what you're looking
at is the final product
or the end goal.
So if the end goal
produces sufficient result,
then it is considered productive.
While in the explorer mentality,
it is the process that you go through
that it takes through that
as the real reward, right?
And in that sense,
this journey has been a roller
coaster kind of journey,
but the speed with which things
have changed and how people
came together is something
that I personally will prize
10 years, 20 years down the
line, looking back at it,
which no end goal can
potentially provide, right?
So it's that mentality.
And everybody has some
aspects of both of them.
They want to have this
explorer thing in some aspects,
and then the empire building
in the other aspect.
And so, that is what
it satisfies in people.
- [John] Okay. So building
up collaborative networks,
purposely innovating at
an unprecedented pace,
working towards a higher purpose.
My question is, are these lessons
that the scientific and
engineering community
are likely to learn from this pandemic?
Are these things going to stick?
What do you two think?
- [Alison] I think so.
I think the other one is collaboration,
John, collaboration from
unlikely partners, right?
It wouldn't have been necessarily a way
that the engineers would have thought
that they could directly connect
into the healthcare system.
Ravi and I've done this
and we have chirp grants,
but sometimes those chirp grants
don't turn into that
productivity out the other end,
quite as quickly.
But this has been, you
know, my presence there,
I hope has helped the engineers
see the healthcare impact
of what this pandemic has meant for us,
not only just what they're
hearing in the news
and the altruism of learning
about providing something good
at the other end beyond the science is
I think one of those things
that I'm going to value for all of this,
because I've made new connections
that I hadn't anticipated
at the beginning of this.
And it's taken my research
in new directions as well.
- [John] Ravi do you want
to maybe comment on that?
Do you see us changing
the way we do things
at McMaster engineering?
- [Ravi] I think so.
I think at least on a personal level,
I'm going to work on projects
that are more impactful.
So that's for sure, that's a small change,
but I think the team
that got involved spanned
across all the engineering
disciplines in McMaster.
And I hope they experience that they got
through this would have changed
mentalities there as well
in order to look into
things that are impactful
to Canada, society, and so on
and to think larger and bigger, right?
So that would be the approach.
The other important thing
that this accelerated
the realization of was
that unlike in the past,
we cannot focus only on
a small expertise area
and be satisfied with contributing
to that expertise area
throughout our lifetime.
We would have to look at
opportunities that arise
and try to use our
expertise in those areas
and try to move into new
areas and contribute.
And this is likely to be the case,
the new norm in the research
landscape as we move forward.
Right. And so the faster we adapt to that,
the better and more successful we will be.
Not only would we survive,
but we will also try in such
a kind of research landscape.
- [John] Okay. So I wanna
to give both of you a chance
to comment on any other
reflections you might have
about the projects, the new center
or the COVID-19 crisis in general.
Is there anything you would
like to add for our audience?
- [Alison] Well, I know that this has been
a big change for everybody.
You know, students, you know,
who changed, how they learn.
Researchers, who've repurposed labs
or rethought about how
they're going to do it.
The public in general.
Is this the last pandemic
we'll see, probably not.
Is this gonna be one of
the longest we've seen
in our modern era? Absolutely.
Has it reframed how we think
about each other? Absolutely.
Am I thankful that I live in
Canada? A hundred percent,
but at the other end of
this, I think for me,
one of the things that's been
new connections among people
that I hadn't thought about.
So out of this, we've got a
young engineering faculty,
Zenub, who now has a CHIR grant.
That's not the usual
route for an engineer.
She's collaborating with people
who've been working in aerosolization
for their entire career.
And she's bringing me along
with a graduate student
who's interested in social determinants.
So we're going to start
building her expertise,
our expertise, and really
build an interesting new team
That's gonna help foster
engineering could careers
and graduate student take her in a pathway
she hadn't thought about either.
- [John] Ravi, do you want
to have anything to add?
- [Ravi] I think in the short term,
we would overestimate the
impact of this pandemic,
and in the long term, we would tend
to underestimate at this time.
So I think it will have a
significant change in perspective,
as well as in all spheres
that we interact with, right?
So this is a fantastic time to
rethink, rethink priorities,
rethink where we want to sort of
take our careers, for instance,
or for the even research
directions or academic directions
for everybody, for the students,
for the faculty members,
for the faculty itself and the university.
So I think obviously this as
an opportunity to do better.
And that is what we should
try to inculcate in all of us,
rather than thinking that we will go back
to the normal as it was before.
So I don't think that it's going to happen
in any sphere of life going forward.
- [John] And it's absolutely clear that
because we were called upon to do it,
stepping outside of our preexisting silos
was maybe an uncomfortable step,
but a very rewarding one in terms
of what we're able to accomplish.
And once you've got made that a habit,
I think it will be hard to go back.
- [Alison] And I think
the hospitals are, John,
just the hospitals are
grateful for that as well.
You know, we are very grateful
that the engineering colleagues stepped up
to do this because, you know,
we may have not produced
necessarily what's gonna be used
immediately in this past
three years or three months,
but it's gonna give us a product
that I think in the long-term,
it's going to be better for us all.
And I'm very grateful to my old
and my new engineering
friends for doing all of this.
- [John] Well, and I have to say, Alison,
we didn't make this the
subject of this podcast,
but Alison has been an advocate
for making engineers aware of areas
where there might be challenges
in terms of testing reagents,
in terms of testing equipment,
in terms of shielding
for healthcare workers
in changing their workplace.
And so there's been a great opportunity
for McMaster Engineering to do it.
So with that, I would like to
wrap up this second episode
of "Big Ideas for a Changing World."
I'd like to thank both Alison and Ravi
for giving us some very
interesting insights
into the early days of the COVID-19 crisis
and how the McMaster engineering
and Hamilton Health Science
and Saint Joe's collaboration
has really worked
in terms of making a difference.
And how it's really opened our eyes
as to the kinds of things we might be able
to accomplish in the future.
Thanks for listening to this episode
of "Big Ideas for a Changing World."
If you enjoyed the show,
be sure to follow us and
let us know your thoughts.
We're at McMaster Engineering
on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook.
