Dr. Christina Salas, a University of New Mexico associate professor in the department of orthopaedics and rehabilitation, was given a $15,000 grant at the beginning of September from the Con Alma Foundation to produce about 5,000 masks for the immigrant community — regardless of documentation status — in New Mexico.
Salas has been leading a project with UNM staff and students, as well as volunteers, to print masks with a 3D printer since April. The actual distribution of the masks started the first week of May, according to Salas.
“It’s a lot easier for us to address the immediate need of protecting people against the pandemic, so that’s why we chose this mask-making effort,” Salas said.
Various groups on campus have been volunteering to help for the project, including the American Indian Science and Engineering Society (AISES), Hispanic Engineering and Science Organization (HESO), Engineers Without Borders, Society of Women Engineers and Out in Science, Technology, Engineering and Math.
“It gives us a great deal of joy to help and feel useful in our community and feel like we’re really having an impact right now as college students,” Diego Rodriguez, vice president of HESO, said.
Rodriguez noted that volunteering amid the pandemic is essential and has clear positive impacts in the community.
“Now these volunteering opportunities are turning into something more tangible, something that’s more meaningful to the students that are joining here because we are trying to connect through the minority communities through minority organizations such as HESO or AISES,” Rodriguez said.
The team is trying to get the majority of the masks out by Christmas, and the future beyond that depends on the severity of the pandemic at that point in time, according to Salas.
“If there’s a resurgence of the pandemic, we likely would keep going assuming that we have all the donations we need from the community,” Salas said.
The project was initially expected to wind down in September due to a sufficient supply of masks, but the grant was awarded and pushed the project even further with stipulations to provide for the local immigrant community.
“We just assumed if things started getting bad again and the need became higher, we would jump back into it,” Salas said.
Salas said the project had previously relied solely on donations, such as UNM’s 3D Printing Fund and the School of Engineering Fund for Academic Excellence.
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“Since it was all donation based, as the need started to drop, our donations started to drop as well,” Salas said. “We were going to wrap things up until needed again, and then we got this $15,000 grant.”
Salas’ team was also producing face shields for a period of time but stopped since the Community College of Central New Mexico and the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology were also doing that, according to Salas.
“Since we’re the only ones in the state who can make the masks, we decided to just kind of leave the shields up to them, and we just took over the mask-making efforts,” Salas said.
Salas said an emotional toll has had a presence on the team that has been working since April, especially since others had time off when the pandemic started while their team kept working.
“We would hear these stories about these great needs for people, and people wearing trash bags over their faces if they needed because they were so low on personal protective equipment (PPE), and so those stories really kept us motivated to keep going,” Salas said.
Many of the groups helping with the project are motivated to help communities that are near and dear to their heart.
President of AISES Durante Ray Pioche-Lee said the pandemic has “really impacted our nation, because for a while there we were pretty bad on PPE,” reflecting on the Navajo Nation that many AISES students live in or have grown up in. He said these students want to help the communities to which they they are connected.
Rodriguez echoed those sentiments, representing the Hispanic heritage that students in HESOS identify with.
“There’s that emotional attachment of you identify with these people, that’s part of your ethnicity, that’s what you’ve grown up with, specifically with Hispanics. We’re trying to help them,” Rodriguez said. “We have these opportunities that we’re given, and so Dr. Salas has really linked us with our community.”
Salas said she works to combine engineering and medical efforts in order to find solutions for issues that could only be fixed with collaboration, and will continue doing so in her teaching at UNM beyond the pandemic.
“My job has always been to kind of bridge engineering and medicine here on campus to basically bring together engineers to work with physicians to solve problems that exist within our hospitals and clinics,” Salas said.
Megan Gleason is the culture editor at the Daily Lobo. She can be contacted at culture@dailylobo.com or on Twitter @fabflutist2716
