Chapman Donates 3D Printed Face Shields To Healthcare Workers

ORANGE, CA — Can 3D printing help save our hospital workers? Students and faculty from Chapman University's Fowler School of Engineering, Schmid College of Science and Technology, and Grand Challenges Initiative think so.

The school is 3D printing face shields for healthcare workers treating COVID-19 patients, through an at-home based program. Chapman is working in collaboration with Orange County-based MatterHackers – which builds and supplies 3D printing equipment – to coordinate distribution to local hospitals.

Using Chapman 3D printers set up in their homes, students and faculty are printing several hundred shields per week and have already donated more than 1,000 shields to hospitals in Southern California and around the country. The shields are produced following strict guidelines to ensure sterility—students use gloves and face shields for minimal touching needed—and the National Institutes of Health has vetted all models.

"When you get down to it, engineering is about building, and the best builds are the ones that keep human needs at the forefront," Erik Linstead, Ph.D., associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science. "While it's hugely satisfying to be able to do something impactful for our healthcare workers during
these difficult times, I'd like to think we are simply staying true to one of the most fundamental lessons we teach our students in the Fowler School of Engineering."
The program's director Gregory Goldsmith, Ph.D., an assistant professor of biological sciences at Chapman, discussed the program in detail.

"The Grand Challenges Initiative is a program dedicated to teaching our undergraduate students how to find transformative solutions to our hardest problems. In this case, we wanted to make an immediate impact by engaging the equipment and materials that we have on hand to make a difference for all of the people providing health care for our community," said Goldsmith.

"MatterHackers, our local partner, has played a vital role in bringing together
the community in a grassroots effort to protect health providers. They are an incredible connector."

MatterHackers has established a Maker Response Hub that includes forms for individual makers, print labs, and engineers with 3D printers or other digital fabrication tools to register their machines and start making crucial supplies.

Healthcare professionals and medical facilities can also use the Response Hub to register for assistance and to be connected to local manufacturing sources.

"We understand the human need to help one another in times of a crisis," states Mara Hitner, director of business development at MatterHackers. "The passion and willingness of the 3D printing community to help were overwhelming, so we created the Maker Response Hub to channel that energy and skill into something meaningful. MatterHackers is privileged to be able to do what we do best - connect people with solutions to be successful in making anything. It's like we've all been training our whole maker lives for this moment."

Linstead and Goldsmith worked with Fowler School of Engineering Dean Andrew Lyon to set up face shield factories at their homes and the homes of students from Jon Humphrey's "3D Printing and Design" course.

Humphrey's students have turned the printing into a friendly competition; the person who prints the most shields gets a roll of gold-colored, 3D printing filament.

"My mother is an emergency medicine physician assistant at a hospital in Los Angeles County. We hear about the scarce levels of equipment at her hospital and all other hospitals around the country," said Chapman biological sciences student Alexandros Drivas, class of 2021. "Because of this, my younger brother and I are producing and distributing protective face shields to frontline healthcare workers.

Many of the skills I am utilizing for this project were developed through Chapman University's Grand Challenges Initiative. The program provided me with resources to study 3D printing and enhanced the necessary critical thinking and problem-solving skills to try to make a difference."

"I am pretty confident that Chapman is the only university that has leveraged a teaching/learning online model to produce critical PPE for healthcare workers," said Andrew Lyon, Ph.D., dean, Fowler School of Engineering.

"Lots of other schools have started making things – and that is awesome – but our faculty have gone above and beyond to engage our students across the country in an amazing, one-of-a-kind, distributed service-learning effort."

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