The COVID-19 pandemic presented unique challenges in efforts to protect both workers and the public. A lack of respirators for health-care workers spurred research on the development of alternatives to the N95 respirator as well as methods to decontaminate them for multiple uses. This presentation will summarize those efforts and provide suggestions for the future.
Professor O’Shaughnessy joined the faculty at the University of Iowa in 1997 where he is a faculty member in the department of Occupational and Environmental Health. He obtained licensure as a Certified Industrial Hygienist (CIH) in 2008. With over 75 publications in peer-reviewed literature, Dr. O’Shaughnessy is a recognized scholar in the field of aerosol physics and human exposure assessment applied to occupational and environmental health concerns. One aspect of his current research is associated with evaluating the effectiveness of filtering facepiece respirators in various work environments, and, most recently, their effectiveness for protecting the wearer from inhaling the COVID-19 virus.
