Page 19 - 2020 Healthcare Heroes Program

The Institute
for Applied
Life Sciences at
UMass Amherst
At a Time of Crisis, Collaboration Was Key to Meeting the Most Pressing Needs
IBy Joseph Bednar
n mid-March, when much of the U.S. was start- ing to hunker down, Peter Reinhart had a feeling he wouldn’t be — and neither would many of the people he works with.
“We didn’t want to be sitting at home watching this pandemic unfold without doing something,” said Reinhart, director of the Institute for Applied Life Sciences (IALS) at UMass Amherst, a facility launched in 2013 with the goal of accelerating life-science research and advancing collaboration with industry to shorten the gap between scientific innovation and technological
siloed, it’s much easier for us to pull together nursing staff, molecular biologists, and engineers, and say, ‘we need to make face shields in the next seven days. How can we do it?’ And they did.”
It took a few tries to get the design right, but the team eventually partnered with K+K Thermoforming of Southbridge to fabricate and distribute 81,000 face shields throughout the region. About 50,000 more followed in a second batch, all able to be shipped flat, 300 to a box, and assembled in 20 seconds by the
HEALTHCARE HEROES OF WESTERN MASSACHUSETTS
“
advancement.
COVID-19 presented a unique
opportunity to do exactly that, under time constraints that truly meant something, because people were dying every day. Take, for example, the work at IALS to develop a low-cost face shield for rapid production.
“We are a platform organization that caters to all departments on campus — nursing, computer science, natural sciences, public health, engineering,” Reinhart said, naming just a few. “Because our institute creates an interface across all these different organizations that are usually
We didn’t
want to be sitting at home watching this pandemic unfold without doing something.”
Peter Reinhart, director of IALS.
Dani Fine Photography
OCTOBER 2020 A19
2020 HEALTHCARE HEROES