Aggie Square Before Aggie Square
By John Marx on April 23, 2020
"Aggie Square is all about accelerating collaboration among faculty across our Davis and Sacramento campuses. It would be difficult to find a better proof of concept to demonstrate how such collaboration addresses wicked problems than the COVID-19 research going on right now.
Here’s an example: As shortages in personal protective equipment, or PPE, were beginning to make news, faculty from some nine departments and three schools on our two campuses came together.
'Initially the Council of Chairs appointed a PPE committee, but this quickly morphed into the larger health system and School of Medicine groups,' recounts Professor Katren Tyler from the Department of Emergency Medicine in Sacramento. 'Somewhere in that mix, I started working with [Professors] Gang Sun (textiles), Gozde Goncu-Berk (design) and Amy Barnhorst (psychiatry).'
Meanwhile, in Davis, 'Jennifer Curtis, the dean of engineering, connected me to the team at UC Davis Health,' reports the materials scientist Atul Parikh. He collaborated with textiles expert Gang Sun too, whose experience developing biocidal and virucidal fabrics dates to the era of SARS.
Dr. Brad Strong from otolaryngology in Sacramento describes an expanding team of faculty that stretched across the causeway: 'I honestly could not tell you all the departments they came from. Many were related to safety and environmental health. We had large, group weekly meetings and then broke into smaller task forces.' Strong became the team leader for the 'snorkel mask' project, following up on an idea from the pulmonologist Dr. Susan Murin. 'We used our 3D printing program to fabricate parts,' Strong explains.
Faculty in fiber and polymer science, wearable technology, and other areas on the Davis campus worked with surgeons and doctors from emergency medicine, among other specializations on the Sacramento campus, as well as staff from the Office of Research, School of Medicine, and Safety Services.
'There were daily Zoom meetings, often with more than 20 participants, which were run with an exceptional sense of urgency, expediency and focus,' Parikh comments, adding, 'If I may, this was probably one of the rarest experiences for me in our academic setting.'
If the exceptional circumstances of COVID-19 lend urgency to collaborations like this one, Aggie Square’s very architecture is designed to make cross-campus teamwork habitual.
The four buildings that compose phase one of Aggie Square will bring together laboratory scientists from different departments as well as from industry. These labs will be next door to classrooms used by the School of Continuing and Professional Education with their workforce development instruction, and Quarter at Aggie Square classes with their immersive and topical undergraduate experiences. All that will be down the hall from a hub for public and engaged scholarship and right across the square from the Alice Waters Institute for Edible Education. The School of Medicine, the School of Nursing, and the hospitals and clinics making up the health campus reside in the same set of city blocks. With all this in one place, Aggie Square sets the stage for extra-departmental collaboration of all kinds."