Jerry Orans: My whole life I’ve always loved engineering and robotics. Being able to creatively think about a problem and adopt a solution is really what I’m good at.
As I was watching the news and reading about how all these PPE shortages were impacting doctors and nurses, I immediately began to try and think, how can I help with this? That’s when it suddenly clicked that myself and a lot of my friends all had 3D printers.
News Reporter: It’s a grassroots movement spearheaded by teenage robotics wiz Jerry Orans, who started the Hack the Pandemic organization.
Jerry Orans: We started to get requests from hospitals asking for thousands of plastic face shields, and it became very clear we needed to scale the organization and get as many makers involved as possible. I very quickly started calling around to teenagers, other students, oh, you have this equipment so you can produce X, Y, and Z, and we were really able to get production ramped up.
We’ve now scaled to over 200 makers, and over the course of the pandemic have produced more than 20,000 face shields for hospitals in need. Hack the Pandemic is all about creativity and using my skills to spark change.