STONY BROOK, NY, MARCH 23 — As New York is battling COVID-19, the potential shortage of personal protective equipment (PPE) for hospital personnel and testing site staff has been thrust into the spotlight. Now, Stony Brook University’s iCREATE lab has stepped up to help, deploying its resources to manufacture face shields through the use of its 3-D printers.

iCREATE, a program under the Division of Information Technology at Stony Brook University, supports innovative technologies within Stony Brook University’s Center for Excellence in Learning and Teaching (CELT) to provide a hands-on environment of collaborative endeavors in order to spark creativity, innovation, and to ultimately redefine technological boundaries, engagement, creation, and innovation.

The face shields, explain Charlie McMahon, Interim Senior Vice President and Enterprise CIO for Stony Brook University, are medically compliant, as they have been reviewed by Stony Brook University Hospital personnel.

Additionally, the team at iCREATE has designed certain parts of these face shields to be replaceable so that medical personnel can change them out, allowing for a more sanitized product.

With current supplies, iCREATE is intending to make 800 face shields, and is currently in the process of procuring enough supplies to make up to 5,000 products.

“We are doing something positive to protect the health of the medical professionals that are helping the community. Being able to be a part of keeping our medical professionals safer is a really good feeling,” McMahon says.

Watch a video of the process here.

Also, Bettina Fries, Chief of Infectious Disease at Stony Brook Medicine reached out to her neighbor, Agjah Libohova, who is the director of research and development and engineer of a local Suffolk plastics production company and told him that we need alternate supplies of face shields. She gave him her face shield and that night he made the first prototype. Today, we learned that the production is to start this week; Stony Brook is the first client.

“These face shields will make us feel safer and show that Stony Brook tries everything to keep health care professionals on the front line safe,” Dr. Fries added.

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About Stony Brook

Stony Brook University, widely regarded as a SUNY flagship, is going far beyond the expectations of today’s public universities. With more than 26,000 students, 2,700 faculty members, nearly 200,000 alumni, an academic medical center and 18 NCAA Division I athletic programs, it is one of only four University Center campuses in the State University of New York (SUNY) system. The University embraces its mission to provide comprehensive undergraduate, graduate, and professional education of the highest quality, and has been ranked among the top 35 public universities in the nation by U.S. News & World Report. Fostering a commitment to academic research and intellectual endeavors, Stony Brook’s membership in the Association of American Universities (AAU) places it among the top 65 research institutions in North America. The University’s distinguished faculty have earned esteemed awards such as the Nobel Prize, Pulitzer Prize, Indianapolis Prize for animal conservation, Abel Prize and the inaugural Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics. Part of the management team of Brookhaven National Laboratory of the U.S. Department of Energy, Stony Brook is one of only eight universities that has a role in running a national laboratory. Providing economic growth for neighboring communities and the wider geographic region, the University totals an impressive $7.23 billion in increased economic output on Long Island. Follow us on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/stonybrooku/) and Twitter(@stonybrooku).