By Jeremy Schwab

When COVID-19 hit the Boston area, Lauren Malsick found herself in a position to help, and she didn’t hesitate. The CAS Biology and Molecular Biology alumna works in BU’s National Emerging Infectious Diseases Laboratories (NEIDL), and she describes hers and her colleagues’ response.

“Before the outbreak we focused on filoviruses, but quickly transitioned during the outbreak to coronavirus research,” she says. “All of us in the NEIDL have been working almost nonstop. Not only have my lab mates been working incredibly hard, many of us have been signed up to volunteer to help Boston Medical Center with their [coronavirus] testing. I have also been working in my spare time as an EMT to assist with Armstrong Ambulance by teaching an infectious disease class.”

Malsick is just one of hundreds of BU Arts & Sciences alumni, students, faculty and staff members who have found themselves with the expertise or ability to help during the pandemic, and have done their part to tackle this challenge from every angle. Their breadth of knowledge and commitment to society are making a difference as countries, towns and cities across the globe work to understand the effects of the virus and better plan their responses to it.

Research takes the lead

Since March, CAS faculty and graduate student researchers have been hard at work trying to understand the coronavirus itself and also working to understand and ameliorate all of the myriad challenges that social distancing and the economic slowdown present for societies. Like all coronavirus-related research going on across the world, these efforts are in their early stages. But they point to a truly global response from the research community, of which BU Arts & Sciences is an active part.

John Porco, director of BU’s Center for Molecular Discovery, leads a team of chemists working with the NEIDL to share and refine novel COVID-19 drug candidates for testing there. “We maintain a chemical collection of thousands of compounds designed for a variety of biological uses,” Porco told The Brink. “We’ve given the NEIDL—with which we’ve had a long-standing collaboration to develop antiviral agents—our entire collection to test against the novel coronavirus. We think there will be some interesting drug candidates that emerge from this screen.”

Meanwhile CAS computer scientists Ran Canetti and Mayank Varia, along with their colleague Ari Trachtenberg in the College of Engineering, are working with researchers from other universities to develop an app that lets you know if you’ve been in contact with the virus without needing your personal information. This effort could help cities, states, and countries reopen their economies while keeping their eyes peeled for a spike in infections.

CAS sociologists Samuel Bazzi, James Feigenbaum, and Martin Fiszbein are studying how social distancing is influenced by individualism, a deeply-rooted feature of American culture. They hope to help officials more effectively tailor public messages to convince the public to practice social distancing.

Randy Ellis, a health economist at CAS, has analyzed the effect of the pandemic on job and income losses, focusing on how vulnerability varies by occupation. He also hopes to study the effects of previous coronaviruses and pneumonia from 2006 to 2018, focusing on seasonality, age, and geography. Meanwhile James Feigenbaum, an economic historian, has two papers on the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic. One studies racial disparities in the flu’s impact, while the other looks at the long-run effect of school closures during that pandemic. These types of studies can give public policymakers the necessary factual grounding to plan for the effects of the pandemic.

Every Arts & Sciences researcher involved with studying the pandemic looks at it from a different angle. Lucy Hutyra, an associate professor of Earth & Environment and expert in carbon pollution, tracked the abrupt decline in carbon emissions in Boston following Massachusetts Governor Charlie Baker’s stay-at-home advisory. “This isn’t enough to have a long-term effect since we haven’t structurally changed anything that would reduce CO2 emissions in the long run, but it depends on what comes next,” says Hutyra, who suggests that the experience of remote work could change people’s behaviors going forward. “I’m sure there will be people who discover they can work from home more, start riding bicycles, and some people who might never get on public transportation again.”

Helping those hardest hit

A cruel twist of the COVID-19 pandemic has been its tendency to harm the most vulnerable communities the most—from elders in nursing homes to working-class urban neighborhoods. Fortunately there are many people working and volunteering to help these populations, including many CAS alumni, faculty members, staff, and students. 

Emmanuel Owusu, a lecturer in the African Studies Center teaching Akan Twi, one of the major languages of Ghana, is one of these people. Emmanuel has been working with his organization the African Bridge Network and partner organizations across the state to organize support for the African immigrant community in Massachusetts. This is especially important because many of the people working on the frontline of the pandemic—in healthcare or grocery stores for instance—are African or of African heritage, and this community-driven campaign seeks to educate and empower these workers about how to protect themselves from COVID-19.

Meanwhile Uma Khemraj (CAS/SAR’21) may be home for the semester in Billerica, MA, but that isn’t stopping her from using her BU education to help others. She is president of Healthcare Improvement, which is a campus group that strives to bring people together and take action to improve our national healthcare system, and the group has been collecting hand sanitizer and working with area nonprofits to distribute it to local homeless shelters. 

Viha Vig (CAS’19), a Biochemistry & Molecular Biology alumnus, works as an ophthalmic technician and clinical research assistant at the Ophthalmology Department at Boston Medical Center. When the virus began spreading in India, he started raising money and distributing food in Bengaluru, India to help low-income people in that area cope with the pandemic. “My father and I raised over $2,700 (over 2,00,000 Indian Rupees) through donations from privileged communities, friends, and family to provide mid-day meals, biscuits, and juice for the underprivileged families in our community,” says Viha. “These families are unable to afford groceries, gas for cooking, electricity, water and other basic necessities to survive during this time. This experience has instilled a greater sense of gratitude in me for everything I am blessed with.”

CAS staff members are helping out too. Carian Diaz, the deputy Title IX coordinator for CAS, and her partner Juan Pablo have been delivering food to immigrant families in their neighborhood of Revere, which has been hard hit by COVID-19. Each week they drop off groceries and essential items to five families who have lost income due to the impact of the virus.

Supplying the front lines: masks, test kits, and a listening ear

Medical personnel on the front lines of the fight against COVID-19 need every tool, and all the support, they can get. To that end, CAS alumni, faculty, and students have mobilized in a variety of ways.

Annissa Essaibi-George (CAS’96) has been connected to BU since childhood, as her dad worked as a security guard on campus. Now, Annissa, who owns Stitch House Dorchester and is a city council in Boston, is using her unique set of skills to support BU’s essential workers. With donations of material from her own supplies and support from the BU Barnes & Noble, she is creating hundreds of masks for the BU police staff, and Boston Mayor Marty Walsh even recently wore one of her creations at a press conference.

Another alum, Loren Wold (CAS’97), is the assistant dean for biological health research in the College of Nursing at Ohio State University and has been working with colleagues and volunteers as OSU to develop and produce new COVID-19 tests. In April the team at Ohio State was producing approximately 9,000 to 10,000 tests per day, according to Dr. Wold, with Governor DeWine announcing an increase to 135,000 tests per week by the end of the month, according to Marketplace Tech. Producing so many tests in such a short period of time has come with a number of innovations. Dr. Wold notes that some of his colleagues had to develop a new kind of media to use in test kits, as the commonly used media is in such short supply. The team at OSU has started to 3-D print their own test swabs as well. The goal of these innovations and the increased production of tests is to ultimately cover the state of Ohio.

While tests, masks, and other supplies are essential for the fight against the coronavirus, it is also essential to help frontline medical workers manage their emotional health as many of them deal with trauma and anxiety stemming from their hands-on work with COVID-19 patients. In early April, Yupei “Pearl” Hu, a psychiatrist at BU’s Center for Anxiety & Related Disorders (CARD) and a CAS clinical assistant professor of psychological and brain sciences, called Bonnie Brown, a CARD nurse administrator and health communications specialist, with an idea. Hu is involved with the national Physician Support Line, and realized that frontline nurses battling COVID-19 are under at least as much stress as the doctors they work with. Maybe there was something CARD could do? As a nurse who had read numerous COVID-19–related accounts of stress from nurses online, Brown agreed and took the idea to Lisa Smith, CARD director and a CAS clinical professor of psychological and brain sciences. Just days later, after a consultation with the Massachusetts Nurses Association, CARD’s support line for nurses in Massachusetts was ready for its first callers.

The help that these faculty, students, alumni and staff members are providing is just the tip of the iceberg of what the CAS and BU communities are doing to help societies manage the ongoing crisis.

Note: Some content from BU Today, The Brink, and Bostonia was used in this article.

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