Friday Focus: Rising to meet the challenge
April 17, 2020
— by Larry Hinzman, vice chancellor for research
Spring has returned, as we knew it would. This has been a long hard winter, but we knew the snow would melt and glorious weather would again bless Interior Alaska.
The COVID-19 pandemic has been the greatest disruption in living memory to our community, to our nation and to the world. This is a terrible time for our society, but we know eventually this will end. Until then, we must do what we can to help our neighbors and those we don’t know. This hardship will be easier for all to bear if we know that we are doing all we can to help.
I am very proud of the response of the UAF research community in rising to the challenge. Our researchers have scoured through their supply cabinets for masks, gloves, lab coats and other personal protective equipment needed by our health care workers. Our engineers have built sterilizers that can quickly decontaminate masks and ventilation hoods. Our computer scientists have designed and produced splitters using 3-D printers to enable ventilators to be used by more than one patient. Our microbiologists and laboratory technicians have volunteered to work in the Alaska State Virology Laboratory to increase the rate of testing samples. They have donated the chemicals needed to make hand sanitizer.
I am also very proud of our faculty and staff who are striving to help students adjust and succeed in this challenging environment. Our people are giving from their hearts and pockets, but they are also giving of their skills and talents. They are helping others through encouragement, flexibility, understanding and kindness. We are using our laboratories, machine shops, computer labs, and our innovation and ingenuity.
We are very fortunate that the federal funding agencies are also being very flexible in adapting programs or interpreting regulations to allow our scientists to re-scope projects to address the COVID-19 crisis. Most funding agencies are creating new research opportunities to address the pandemic and its impacts. They are also being quite flexible in allowing research projects to change their scope because social distancing or travel bans make original goals impossible to reach.
Our university leadership is doing all we can to keep UAF education, research and service as functional as possible. We are striving to help our faculty, staff and students continue their work and achieve their goals. Protecting the health and well-being of our students, employees and the public is our top priority, but it is also our intention to maintain the strength and viability of our university.
Next year spring will again return to Alaska. I hope by then we can look back on this as a time of illness and isolation, as a time of loss, but also as a time when we rose to meet the challenge. We will tell each other that it was hard, but that we did all that we could to help. And, we will look upon our university with pride as a beacon of learning, compassion, discovery and creation.
Friday Focus is a column written by a different member of UAF’s leadership team every week.