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Director's Message
Dear Colleagues,
Welcome back after a glorious long weekend.
It is a huge pleasure to share with you news from our colleagues in the MakerSpace who have combined talents across three Schools in support of the effort to safeguard our regional health care workers against COVID-19 infection. Three weeks ago the team shown above, comprised of staff across Physics, Art & Design and Engineering joined forces to develop a variation on the open-source face shield design from the MakerSpace at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Sourcing local materials and deploying fabrication facilities across campus the team rapidly prototyped, sought feedback from colleagues at Canberra Hospital and tooled-up for mass production. These shields are to be used when conventional supply lines become stained and will be distributed by ACT Health and by Queanbeyan Hospital for the NSW region. They will also be used by the ANU COVID-Response team. Left to Right, top to Bottom: Sophia Cole sporting the latest model (RSEEME), Saskia Morris (RSPhys), Simon Ramsey (SoA&D), Jordan Haddrick (RSPhys), Rachael Hanrick (RSPhys), John Debs (DQS, RSPhys), Sean Booth (SoA&D) and Sam Legge sporting the prototype that started things rolling (DQS, RSPhys). This week they will make 2000 face shields.
If you’d like to join the production team as we gear up to make 15,000 face shields please see the Physics Exchange. In the coming weeks I'll be letting you know about the contributions our MakerSpace, Mechanical and Electronics workshops will be making to other types of PPE in our response to COVID-19. There are many ways we can all contribute and I’m grateful to PhD student, Bryce Henson (LPC), for drawing our attention to the call for spare computer power to crowd-source COVID protein structure simulations. I am certain you have a multitude of good ideas and I would be delighted to about hear them and to support them wherever I can.
Over the past few weeks some of us have voiced a shared concern about the increasing rhetoric around anti-globalisation and the potential impact on international collaborative research. If you have not yet done so, please reach out to your international collaborators. Check in with them, see how they are going and when the time is right talk about future work together. More than even the world needs enduring global partnerships and with the highest number of internationally collaborations of any Physics school in Australia we have an important role to play. The simple act of reaching out can make a real impact.
One last point of housekeeping. Please register for working at home with eForms as well completing the WEG checklist, links below. Supervisors can use this information to better understand their staff and students conditions using Insight. Just remember that you need to use a reverse proxy or VPN to log on remotely to Insight .
Many thanks to Karen Nulty from our HDR Team for sending in a photo from her garden (below). Have a lovely, short week.
Tim |
