You don’t get much more Atlanta than Kentez Craig.

“I grew up just 5 minutes south of the airport,” said Craig. “My parents were always driving to the local hospital or fire station for work.”

Craig’s parents, Kenneth and Jackie Craig, actually met working together at Grady Hospital, and both have served as first responders across the metro Atlanta area.

“They both worked at Dekalb Fire Rescue for a while. My dad’s currently working as a paramedic in the ER of a local hospital,” Craig said.

After graduating from Our Lady of Mercy Catholic High School in Fayetteville, Craig began studying mechanical engineering at Georgia Tech. Now, as he completes his master’s degree, he’s inspired by his parents' hard work in the community: He is part of a team of graduate and Ph.D. students working with Georgia Tech faculty to develop much-needed protective devices for healthcare workers, like his parents.

“Ideally, lives will be saved because of this, and I don’t think there’s a greater thing that we could be doing right now,” he says.

Craig has helped develop face shields and ventilators that have been drawn up and designed with advice from clinicians in hospitals and emergency rooms across Atlanta. And he is currently helping construct a foldable box that serves as a shield to protect healthcare workers while they perform intubations. Intubation is the process of tube insertion necessary to place a patient on a ventilator to assist with breathing during an illness like COVID-19.

“Even though the patient is sedated, some of those involuntary reflexes are still there. When they cough, that aerosolizes the virus, putting everyone in the room at risk,” said Craig.

This box structure that Craig and his team have been working on provides an extra layer of protection for doctors and nurses having to perform this procedure, which is especially helpful given the shortage of standard personal protective equipment.

The device also serves another very important purpose.

“It also helps keep their N95 masks cleaner, so they can use them for longer,” he explains.

Craig says this entire experience has made him look around in awe at the people stepping up to the challenge.