Researchers in the Jennifer Lewis lab have developed low-cost, plastic and foam-based face shields that can be quickly mass produced. After working with health care professionals on the best design, the researchers have to date delivered almost 1,000 face shields to local area hospitals to address the shortage of personal protective equipment (PPE) for health care workers on the frontlines of COVID-19.

“Our team worked around the clock to design, fabricate, and test multiple face shield iterations, so that they could help the frontline medical workers who desperately need PPE,” said Lewis, who is the Hansjörg Wyss Professor of Biologically Inspired Engineering at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, a Core Faculty member of Harvard’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering, and an Affiliate Faculty member of HSCI.

“Tackling this kind of project felt natural to us, since our lab has one foot in engineering and one foot in biotechnologies for health care purposes,” said lab member Sébastien Uzel. “We all felt good that we had a way to use our engineering skills to help health care workers.”

Read more

Read the full version of this story on the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences website, published on May 18, 2020 under the title “Harvard researchers deliver hundreds of face shields to front line medical personnel.”