Personal Protective Equipment Team

The next recipient of the Serving Our Community Award goes to the PPE team—27 people who worked together from every corner of the Institute.

• Jim Bagley, Strategic Sourcing Analyst, VPF
• Douglas Ciulla, Supervisor, Mail Services, Department of Facilities
• Ainsley Cray, Funds Information Coordinator, Office of the Recording Secretary, VPF
• Martin Culpepper, Professor of Mechanical Engineering, and Project Manus
• Jim Doughty, IHP Sr. Program Manager, Environment, Health and Safety
• Regina Dugan, Counsel, Office of General Counsel
• Tolga Durak, Managing Director, Environment Health and Safety, Office of the Executive Vice President and Treasurer & Vice President of Campus Services and Stewardship
• Mike Fahie, Manager, Mail Services, Department of Facilities
• Rory Harrington, Senior Leadership Giving Officer, Office of Leadership Giving, Resource Development
• Simon Johnson, Ronald A. Kurtz Professor of Entrepreneurship, Sloan School of Management
• Valerie Jean Karplus, (formerly) Sloan School of Management
• Steve Lanou, Project Manager, Office of Sustainability
• Monica Lee, Senior Communications Officer, Communications & Customer Engagement, Department of Facilities
• Tami Lieberman, Hermann L.F. von Helmholtz Assistant Professor, IMES and Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
• Christina T Lo, Director of Strategic Sourcing and Contracts, VPF
• Molly Katherine McGuigan, MIT Graduate student, CTL
• Nicole Morell, Sustainability Communications Specialist, Office of Sustainability
• Nadia Morrison, Manager of Finance and Administration, Environment, Health and Safety
• Martin W. O'Brien, Senior Manager, Campus Services & Maintenance
• Darren O’Connor, Supervisor, Mail Services, Department of Facilities
• Nicolas Paquin, Associate Director, Environment, Health and Safety
• Maura Ridge, Leadership Giving Officer, IMES
• Daniela Rus, Deputy Dean of Research, CSAIL Director, Andrew and Erna Viterbi Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
• Zach Sweet, Contracting Services Department, Lincoln Laboratory
• Courtney Vigo, Financial Analyst 1, VPF
• Kathy D Vitale, Director of Gift Administration, Office of the Recording Secretary, VPF
• Michael B Yaffe, David H. Koch Professor in Science, Department of Biology

When the rest of the world shut down in the early days of the pandemic, a team of MIT faculty, staff, and students ramped up BIG TIME. The 27 members of the PPE team came from Mail Services, Facilities, the Office of Sustainability, Campus Services, EHS, MIT Sloan, Mechanical Engineering, Resource Development, Civil Engineering, and many other areas of campus to collaborate toward a single critical goal: round up PPE and get it out to first responders.

The team collected N95 masks, gloves, gowns, antiseptic wipes, swabs and other PPE from 50 departments, labs, and centers, as well as from alumni around the world. In the earliest days of the pandemic, the team distributed more than 1.2 million items of personal protective equipment—in fact, one in every five units of PPE in Massachusetts was sourced from MIT.

Thank you team, on behalf of the millions of people who benefited from your efforts, which turned out to be a model for emergency mobilization. Congratulations!