CSU Channel Islands may be operating in a virtual environment right now, but CSUCI faculty, staff and students from several different academic programs have mobilized and fired up 3-D printers to print badly-needed protective face shields.
SO far, 51 printers are humming away in
University members’ garages, kitchens, bedrooms and dens across the region in an effort to help medical personnel protect themselves as they treat patients diagnosed with the COVID-19 virus.
“Otherwise our printers were just going to be sitting and gathering dust,” said Computer Science lab technician Ricky Medrano. “My printer is running in my bedroom 24 hours a day. It’s the white noise I go to bed with.”
The movement began about two weeks ago with Chemistry Lecturer Safa Khan, Ph.D., who worried constantly about her husband, a physician who was working at the Ventura County Medical Center (VCMC) and Santa Paula Hospital.
“I was crying every day,” Khan said. “My husband told me somebody donated a welder’s mask and they were using garbage bags as protective gowns.”
Then it occurred to her that the CSUCI campus had 3-D printers that could perhaps be operated remotely and campus members had their own personal 3-D printers at home.
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