April 9, 2020
Wright Lab is supporting the University’s response to COVID-19 in several ways, as can be seen on our Wright Lab COVID-19 response website. Below are a few details given by some of our community members about some of the work they’ve done over the past few weeks.
- Research scientist and associate director for instrumentation and education James Nikkel has been working working on replicating a number of small disposable fittings that are used for ventilator systems, parts that have been identified by the hospital as likely to be in short supply. Nikkel acquired and measured samples, and then generated computer models of them. He made a couple of minor modifications so they could be 3D-printed, tested them on the Wright Lab Advanced Prototyping Center printer, and then sent the successful model’s files along to people working on procurement, who have identified some printing shops that can produce them out of a medically safe plastic.
- Senior research scientist in physics David Rabinowitz is looking into how to find more precise methods to calibrate and measure temperatures with a non-contact thermometer.
- Associate Research Scientist Thomas Langford, who also works at the Yale Center for Research Computing in computational research support, is supporting a researcher in Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry to perform gene sequencing of COVID-19 samples using GPUs on the Farnam high-performance computing cluster.
Members of the community are invited to join the discussion and bring ideas to Wright Lab’s covid19 Slack channel.
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