RAMP Alum Vail Produces PPE to Help in COVID-19 Fight

04/22/2020

Katherine Vail, a second-year student in the Mechanical Engineering department and among the RAMP’18 cohort at UMass Lowell, has been spending the last few weeks using her engineering skills to support her mom, Jennifer, an emergency room nurse and other health-care workers at Cambridge Hospital and its affiliates in Massachusetts as they battle the COVID-19 virus.  

In the last week of March, Massachusetts began to see the beginnings of an exponential growth in the number of cases testing positive for COVID-19 and Jennifer Vail knew they were soon going to be running dangerously low on their PPE needs.

Katie also learned first hand the painful bruising and blisters that nurses and doctors were experiencing on their noses and ears with prolonged use of the PPE and went about designing with her dad, Luke, an adjustable mask extender to release the pressure.  

Setting up a CNC machine in their basement, they made the adjustable clips out of Plexiglass, sanded them down and distributed them to her mom’s group in the ER.  As demand for them increased from across the country, they have made these clips available online via Etsy.  

Katie is also working to distribute the face shields being produced at the university under the direction of ME Prof. Jonathan Alderete and provides feedback from her mother’s team to expand and improve on this initiative. The face shields and extenders are in use everyday and we are forever grateful to those on the front line helping to keep us safe and to people like the Vail family, Prof. Alderete and so many others that bring true meaning to "we are in this together."