As the COVID-19 pandemic rearranged the plans of students across U of T Engineering over the past few months, one question was on many minds: what can I do to help?
Now, dozens of students are taking action.
The U of T COVID-19 Student Engagement Awards were created to fund inspiring innovations designed to respond to the COVID-19 crisis to take flight. Across the University, more than 150 multidisciplinary teams have received up to $3,000 each to support development of their projects over the next three months.
A total of 47 U of T Engineering students, including nine ChemE undergraduate and graduate students, are leading or contributing to these teams. The Faculty has invested an additional $54,000 total to support the engineering projects, which address a wide range of issues, from hand hygiene to reduce the spread of the virus, to strategies to maintaining good mental health while in isolation.
The list of ChemE student projects includes:
The future of protein design: a machine learning approach to COVID-19 outbreak — Tianyu Lu, Joseph Bellissimo, Hannah So, Rochelle Wang, Shea-sarah Garcia, Danielle Serra, Rose Talebi, Edward Shen, Xiaotong Wang (ChemE), Adriana Díaz Lozano Patiño (EngSci), Gamen Liu (ChemE)
A proposal for the development of an App for self-reporting of COVID-19 associated symptoms — Sulaiman Jalloh (ChemE MEng candidate), Abhinav Mohan (MIE MASc candidate), Leticia Nndagang (MEng candidate), Kuda Masalila
Tackling Shortages of N95 Masks with a Simple, Effective, and Removable Desiccant Strip Design — Ziting (Judy) Xia (ChemE), Purushoth Thavendran (ChemE), Amro Aswad (ChemE), Jingyi (Jenny) Wei (MechE), Xiaoou (Bessie) Li (IndE)
Survey: Impact of COVID-19 on Graduate Students in Canada — Sivani Baskaran, Frank Telfer, Maegan Ong, Dawn Bannerman (ChemE PhD candidate), Caroline Pao, Samantha McWhither, Bryony McAllister, Isabella Lim, Vidhant Pal (BME PhD candidate), Farah Qaiser, Kali Iyer
COVID19Recovery — Leo Zhu (ChemE MASc candidate), Julia Lee, Grace Guo, Sissi Zhu, Juliana Lee
Projecting the supply and use of pristine and reprocessed N95 respirators in a hospital — Paul Chen (ChemE PhD candidate), Matthew Yau, Tommaso Alba, Krish Bilimoria, Shangmou (Samuel) Wu