And #teamOSTP was excited to receive a Corsi–Rosenthal box from Noah Webster MicroSociety Magnet School students. These inexpensive, DIY cubes help to clean indoor air, improving cognition and health. “Air Force One,” indeed! Thanks @NWMMSHartford! https://t.co/CBEJTmauwY
— Alondra Nelson (@AlondraNelson46) September 10, 2022
COVID-19 cases may be falling, but the virus is still a very real concern for many parents sending their children back to school. UConn researchers are working to ease those worries by building do-it-yourself air purifiers to improve health in schools and other crowded settings. The Indoor Air Quality Initiative, which has already made an impact in Connecticut, is growing, thanks to a generous donation.
The initiative has received a $300,000 grant, funded through cryptocurrency, from Balvi, an investment and direct giving fund established by Vitalik Buterin, the co-creator of Ethereum. Ethereum is a technology for building computer applications and organizations, holding assets, transacting, and communicating without being controlled by a central authority. Balvi was established for the purpose of deploying funds quickly to high-value COVID-19 projects that traditional institutional or commercial funding sources tend to overlook.
“Improving the quality of indoor air is a key tool for dealing with covid and future pandemics without any disruption to normal life,” says Buterin. “We are excited to support grassroots initiatives to improve air quality in schools and other public venues.”
The donation will allow UConn to expand the project’s reach and add to the more than 400 purifiers already in schools, libraries, shelters, and other locations throughout the state.
When Dr. Richard Corsi floated an idea on Twitter for a highly effective, inexpensive, DIY air purifier to help lower the risk of Covid, his light-bulb moment went viral in the best possible way. Now many of America’s top scientists—and even the White House—are touting the invention, and people all over the planet are thinking inside the box.
This story started, as so many do, with something small. In this case, magnitudes smaller than the period at the end of this sentence—a tiny droplet carrying the SARS CoV-2 virus.
It all began on Jan. 20, 2020, when environmental engineer and air quality expert Dr. Richard Corsi, the man at the center of this particular story, tweeted out a BBC article about a “new virus in China” that by that point had led to only two confirmed deaths. But Corsi could read between the lines and commented on the news with these five prescient words: “This deserves the world’s attention.”
By February, concerned that the virus could be airborne, Corsi dropped his routine of going to the gym six days a week and stopped taking public transportation.
The story got bigger from there—much bigger.
A lifelong academic specializing in air quality, Corsi was especially concerned about the ability of cash-strapped schools to protect their students and faculty. In July, as students prepared to return to school, his concern grew considerably, and he tweeted: “Public K-12 schools serve as a place to work or learn for more than 15% of the total population of the United States each year. IMHO, they are THE critical ‘business’ to watch during re-opening in the fall. I’ve worked w/ many school districts and know how resource-constrained they are and, in many cases, strained in terms of facilities staff. This gives me gr8 concern. If not done right the educational, health & econ impacts could be devastation on top of current devastation.”
The glowing box, pulsing with rainbowy light, looks as if it was dropped into this Studio City living room from a warehouse rave.
It came, in fact, from the garage where Alex LeVine has been tinkering with fans, filters and tape, trying to bring a bit of fun to a simple tool to prevent the spread of COVID-19. The mesmerizing device uses fans and filters to pull contaminants — including smoke, dog dander and the unwelcome coronavirus — out of indoor air.
It can also flash in time to the sounds of Phil Collins. “In the Air Tonight,” of course.
“People aren’t embracing any of the other things that can avert disaster in this pandemic,” said LeVine, a 49-year-old cannabis company executive with an electrical engineering degree who started building trippy do-it-yourself filtration boxes as a hobby. “Maybe I can create a way to clean the air that people want in the middle of the room.”
Read Me @ The LA Times
Story originally published on UConn Today
Several UConn faculty, staff, and students are being honored for their work benefitting citizens and communities as recipients of the annual Provost’s Awards for Excellence in Community Engaged Scholarship.
The awards recognize scholarly activities led by members of the UConn community that are in collaboration with local, regional/state, national, or global communities to create conditions for the public good, culminating in sustainable change and dissemination of these activities. These activities integrate community service with research, creative work, and teaching.
The awardees for 2022 are as follows:
Staff, Emerging: Marina Creed
Marina A. Creed is a Family Nurse Practitioner at the Multiple Sclerosis Center within the Department of Neurology at UConn Health. Creed was nominated for her cross-campus UConn Indoor Air Quality Initiative efforts to protect her patients and surrounding communities during the COVID-19 pandemic, including spearheading an interventional public health initiative spanning UConn Health and UConn’s Schools of Medicine, Nursing, and Engineering. The initiative’s goal is to improve indoor air quality in the community and reduce the transmission of COVID-19. Creed became the integral force behind getting 400 “Corsi-Rosenthal Boxes” into public school districts and vulnerable community locations. These low-cost, do-it-yourself air purifiers have been used in other places around the country but are just emerging to reduce indoor air contaminants, including SARS-CoV-2 viral particles, in situations in which more expensive changes to ventilation are either impossible or will take years to implement. Hundreds of these air purifiers have also been built and donated to Coventry, Hartford, and West Hartford Public Schools, as well as to local homeless shelters, medical clinics, and public libraries. Her efforts have helped many schools become safer and she is working with team behind the initiative to quantify the intervention’s impact on air quality in the pilot school districts, and build a public-facing website to teach communities how to build the unit through a STEM lesson plan for K-12 schools.
COVENTRY — Since the COVID-19 pandemic began, many schools with aging ventilation systems have struggled to remove virus-carrying particles from the air. The University of Connecticut School of Nursing has devised an innovative solution, however, that was being installed today in Coventry schools.
Some 150 do-it-yourself air purifiers, known as Corsi-Rosenthal Boxes, built by university students on the Storrs campus over the weekend, were donated to Coventry schools to help them properly ventilate indoor spaces. The purifiers are built from commonly found materials, such as a box fan, air filters, cardboard, and duct tape, said Mikala Kane, UConn School of Nursing spokeswoman.
“I was pretty excited to have this opportunity come this way,” Coventry Superintendent David Petrone said last week. “It’s no secret that our (ventilation) systems are on the older side of things.” There’s no cost to the town for the air purifiers, which come as a result of a partnership between the school district and the university started seven years ago, he added.
“This is a very simple unit that costs about $60 that students, adults, teachers and even our students here at UConn can make, using just these simple materials,” said Marina Creed, a nurse practitioner with UConn Health who spearheaded the initiative with Michelle Cole, an associate clinical professor with the university’s School of Nursing.
COVENTRY — Since the COVID-19 pandemic began, many schools with aging ventilation systems have struggled to remove virus-carrying particles from the air. The University of Connecticut School of Nursing has devised an innovative solution, however, that was being installed today in Coventry schools.
Some 150 do-it-yourself air purifiers, known as Corsi-Rosenthal Boxes, built by university students on the Storrs campus over the weekend, were donated to Coventry schools to help them properly ventilate indoor spaces. The purifiers are built from commonly found materials, such as a box fan, air filters, cardboard, and duct tape, said Mikala Kane, UConn School of Nursing spokeswoman.
COVID-19 transmits more easily in overcrowded and poorly ventilated places. To address this, UConn Health has united the UConn community to kick off an Indoor Air Quality Initiative, building inexpensive do-it-yourself air purifiers as part of a pilot project to improve community health in local elementary schools, homeless shelters, and beyond.
The new initiative, organized by UConn Health and its Comprehensive Multiple Sclerosis Center, with the UConn School of Nursing, School of Engineering, School of Medicine, the Department of Public Health Sciences, and Connecticut Area Health Education Center Network, believes that a multi-pronged approach to mitigate the risk of COVID-19 can involve the community—and that accessible, inexpensive DIY portable indoor air cleaners are one effective way to do it.
Among other strategies, the initiative is building and distributing the “Corsi-Rosenthal Box” to help stop the spread of COVID-19 and other viruses such as influenza. The boxes remove 90% of virus-carrying aerosols from the air, and are also effective against dust and allergens. With just about 30 minutes of an assembler’s time and $60 worth of supplies including a box fan, high-quality air filters, cardboard and duct tape, these devices drastically reduce COVID-carrying aerosols, providing comparable filtration capabilities to expensive professionally manufactured portable HEPA filters.
“Cleaner air will protect educators, students, and families. This DIY portable air cleaner is a low-cost, evidence-based intervention that immediately improves indoor air quality,” says UConn Health MS Center Nurse Practitioner Marina A. Creed, who spearheaded the initiative with the help of friend and colleague Sarah Laskowski of The Jackson Laboratory. Creed is concerned about her patients who are educators, paraprofessionals and parents, and both she and Laskowski have children in public schools. “My hope is that we can help make schools one of the safest places in the community, and by extension, better protect my patients, many of whom are immunocompromised.”
UConn’s School of Nursing and the School of Engineering are currently testing Corsi-Rosenthal Boxes in real world settings, looking at the effectiveness at removing particulate matter from the air in a classroom in Storrs Hall.
After contacting several school districts for the first 100-unit pilot program, West Hartford Public Schools volunteered to deploy these units to their cafeterias, where students eat lunch unmasked. The next 100-units in the pilot program will be built by 500 undergraduate engineering students as part of their ENG1166 class and will be deployed to Coventry Public Schools, where they will be utilized in cafeterias, classrooms, and other public spaces throughout the district. Additional box-a-thons are being planned for early 2022. The boxes, which use about the same amount of electricity as a single lightbulb, could be an affordable intervention to improve school air quality in almost any space in any school.
“This is a nurse-led initiative that came from the point of patient care,” says UConn School of Nursing Associate Dean for Academic Affairs Angela Starkweather. “This is about the whole connection we have with the community. An infection could from the patient setting to the community, and vice versa. You want to protect your patients,” and mitigating that risk using these inexpensive air filters protects children, vulnerable patients, and the broader community, Starkweather says.
The team is working on a website expected to go live in January that will enable any school or institution in Connecticut to build their own air filtration boxes.
“This is interventional public health in action,” says Dr. Jaime Imitola, Director of the UConn Health MS Center. “It is impressive what the UConn Community can do and rally toward a worthy cause.”
Health officials at the University of Connecticut made indoor air cleaners in an effort to stop the spread of Covid-19 in classrooms.
With just a box fan, high-quality air filters, cardboard and duct tape, they assembled 100 boxes which will go in cafeterias in West Hartford schools.
UConn Health will host a box-a-thon event on Saturday in efforts to prevent the spread of COVID-19.
On Saturday, UConn Health nurses and students from the School of Nursing and Medicine will assemble 100 portable indoor air filters to distribute.
The devices will be donated to nearby public elementary schools and local homeless shelters to improve their air quality.