Video: Interview with the Leaders of the MIT Face Shield Project

“It’s a very sad time, it’s a very sobering time—but it is a magical time because MIT did what it was supposed to,” says Elazer Edelman ’78, SM ’79, PhD ’84, the Edward J. Poitras Professor in Medical Engineering and Science and director of the Institute for Medical Engineering and Science, in an April 17 MIT Alumni Association Faculty Forum Online webinar. “It raised itself up to meet its moral obligations, behind science and technology and engineering, to improve the human condition.”

Edelman was joined for the webinar by Marty Culpepper SM ’97, PhD ’00, professor of mechanical engineering and director of MIT’s Project Manus, to answer alumni questions about the project they are leading to develop, mass-produce, and donate low-cost face shields in response to the Covid-19 pandemic. Hear the two discuss these efforts and other ongoing research at MIT that is addressing the crisis head-on in a recording of the webinar.

The MIT face shield project—expected to ramp up production to 3 million daily—was also featured on NBC Nightly News on April 14. Watch the segment:

As NBC News senior correspondent Cynthia McFadden reports in the segment: “The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has long been on the front lines of solving America’s problems.”

Or in Edelman’s words: “The global pandemic has had a global response because of technologies that we have invented and people we have educated.”