Dear Colleagues and Friends,

Across our region and beyond, UWM’s world-class researchers, faculty members, staff and students are stepping up to fight the coronavirus. From Milwaukee to communities around the globe, our people are providing care, working around the clock to amass supplies for front-line health care and other workers, researching treatment for patients who have underlying chronic diseases, and employing data science to predict and address the ravages of COVID-19. These are the faces of hope in an otherwise uncertain time and why UWM continues to be one of America’s top research universities.

Best Regards,

Mark A. Mone, PhD
Chancellor
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

Public Health Research, Supply Drives and Predicting Infection

UWM faculty members, staff and students are assisting efforts to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic however possible, whether it’s providing personal protective equipment, offering expertise to health departments or pushing forward with relevant research.

UWM recently collected more than 30,000 gloves and over 1,000 other protective items, including hundreds of masks, and donated them for local distribution. Moreover, Kyle Jansson, director of the Prototyping Center at UWM’s Innovation Campus, is part of a citywide effort to mass produce medical-grade face masks for health workers and first responders.

The Mask-Force collaboration includes several area colleges and universities as well as Husco, BioCut, Rexnord and many other companies. Its goal is to quickly produce masks with as many reusable parts as possible. Jansson designed the first prototype with plastic parts that can be either 3D-printed or scaled up with injection-molding processes.

Also, seven UWM researchers at the Zilber School of Public Health are volunteering their expertise to the Milwaukee Health Department during the pandemic. They include epidemiologist Amy Kalkbrenner, who is helping determine the extent of COVID-19 spread in the absence of enough testing.

Kalkbrenner has launched a symptom collection project at wecountcovid19.com. People who feel sick can report symptoms through this confidential online survey she developed. Open and free to anyone in the country, it will report information on symptoms by ZIP code and day, giving an improved picture of the outbreak.

And, biomedical engineer Masha Dabagh’s research could help health professionals better understand the progression of COVID-19, particularly for high-risk patients. Dabagh is developing a computational model to predict a patient’s risk of infection and reveal avenues for potential treatment.

Dabagh says it’s difficult for the virus to pass through healthy membranes in the lungs and enter the bloodstream to spread. Her model mimics defects in respiratory membranes that are caused by old age or diseases and increase someone’s susceptibility to the virus. Understanding these defects could inform how patients with different underlying chronic diseases are treated. The model can then be applied to current high-risk patients for validation.