RAPID: On-mask Chemical Modulation of Respiratory Droplets

Year 2020 has a devastating start with the outbreak of COVID-19 respiratory disease caused by a novel coronavirus now named SARS-Cov-2, which was first reported in Wuhan, China and has quickly spread to over 100 countries and territories with over 100,000 confirmed infections and over 3000 deaths in two months. Healthcare professionals and biomedical researchers are at the forefront of this global battle to contain and mitigate the spread of this disease. Remarkable progresses have been made in identifying the virus, sequencing its genes, resolving related protein structures and tracking its origins to help understand how it spread. Development and clinic trials of vaccines, antiviral drugs and other medical intervention techniques are also been accelerated. There has already been hundreds of journal publications in biological and medical areas regarding COVID-19, reflecting intense research efforts to tackle this urgent global crisis. Obviously, virus spread and transmission is relevant to many physical sciences and engineering subjects such as droplets, aerosols, capillary action, particle adsorption, surfactant bilayers, filtration and surface functionalization, etc., but there has been virtually no contribution from the broad areas of physical sciences and engineering yet. What can researchers in these research disciplines do to help? The proposal aims to explore materials based, user-centered strategies to inactivate respiratory virions. To broaden the impacts, the proposal also plans to organize efforts in physical sciences and engineering so that more researchers are educated about the science of virus transmission and prevention. This should help to extract and define new research problems, which could lead to more effective processes and actions to address this type of global challenges. It will also better prepare and equipped researchers to inform and educate the general public to battle panic and misinformation.