Terriers come together in time of need
In these extraordinary times, the entire Boston University community has come together in extraordinary ways. The hashtag that many of us used to share photos and messages of support on April 2 says it all: #TerriersTogether.
What that means in practice is that, in the face of a global pandemic, economic upheaval, and a renewed focus on the persistent effects of racism in the US, BU’s students, alumni, faculty, and friends responded with compassion and action. To take just one example: when the University announced the founding of the Center for Antiracist Research, Terriers responded with a remarkable outpouring of support.
By mid-September, the Center had received more than $15 million from 2,000-plus donors, including many who had never before given to BU—and some who had no previous connection with the University. Supporters also turned to other BU funds to express support for the Black Lives Matter movement; you can find many of those funds here. Meanwhile, the Center’s founding director, Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities Ibram X. Kendi, joined the BU community in June for a Day of Collective Engagement. Faculty, students, and staff came together on Zoom for a series of webinars and discussions about racism and antiracism. You can watch many of the presentations here.
Like so many events around the world, this year’s in-person Commencement activities had to be canceled. But alumni banded together to send messages of support and empathy to the graduating Class of 2020. Particularly sympathetic were the members of the Class of 1970, the only other BU alumni to have had their graduation festivities canceled. Watch a video in which Questrom’70 grads share advice and reflections for all 2020 Terriers, and see how the BU Alumni Association celebrated this newest group of alumni.
At the BU School of Medicine, the pandemic had an even more striking effect on graduation. The school moved quickly to graduate the Class of 2020, so that these newly minted doctors could head to the front lines of treating patients as COVID-19 taxed the resources of healthcare facilities everywhere.
That’s just one of the ways the University has responded to the pandemic. In March, students and professors alike pivoted almost overnight to remote learning; they have now pivoted again to a combination of remote and in-person classes. Thanks to the University’s Learn from Anywhere (LfA) hybrid model, students can choose, course by course, whether to come to campus or attend class online.
And many students are back on campus, along with many faculty and staff. The University’s thoughtful, cautious plan for reopening, outlined in Back2BU, has made it possible to return to campus safely. Regular testing—twice a week for all undergraduates and once a week for those who interact with them, from faculty to grad students, as well as contact tracing and careful adherence to social distancing protocols—have kept infections extremely low at BU, much lower than for Massachusetts overall. And a public-facing dashboard lets everyone see just how things stand, with data updated every day.
“Routine testing is the only way to find everyone who’s infected,” says President Robert A. Brown, and he and the team that developed BU’s plan are confident that they’re doing everything they can to keep the campus community safe. Researchers also explained in a recent article that the work they’ve done for BU will add significantly to the general body of knowledge about COVID-19.
“Within our environment, we’ll be able to understand much more about contact tracing than anyone knows yet,” says Brown. And the data collected at BU can help scientists work toward determining the true probability that someone who comes in contact with an infected person will actually develop the virus. “Until now, there hasn’t been good enough data to figure that out,” he adds.
BU is sharing much of this data with other universities and has also provided support to Massachusetts Governor Charlie Baker’s higher education task force on the pandemic—leadership made possible by the University’s robust research facilities, computing power, and faculty expertise. All of those resources are also being brought to bear on a host of research projects focused on COVID-19 and its many effects on everything from the US healthcare system to the economy to individual mental health.
One recent study, for example, explores the cascade of tissue inflammation that the virus often sets off in the lungs—and that can be particularly dangerous for older patients. The School of Public Health (SPH) offers frequent webinars featuring the latest insights into the epidemic, including one on the current state of the science; SPH also recently released the first national study on increased rates of depression during the pandemic. And, perhaps most notably, the scientists at BU’s National Emerging Infectious Diseases Laboratories (NEIDL) have dropped their routine projects to focus single-mindedly on the search for vaccines and treatments.
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