URI_Research_Magazine_Momentum_Fall_2020_Melissa-McCarthy

Volunteers inspecting the donated CPAP and BiPAP devices.

“At a time when it was easy to stay home and be scared, all of our volunteers, including many students and faculty, were part of a team that required ingenuity.” - Erik Brine

“The thing that makes Rhode Island amazing, is that you can get all the right people in the same room at the same time,” Rumsey said. Brine, a battle tested colonel and U.S. Air Force reservist, executive director of the National Institute for Undersea Vehicular Technology (based at both URI and UConn) and former state emergency preparedness liaison, is one of those people. “The Rhode Island ventilator project came together within a couple weeks,” Brine said. “We all thought the end of April would be the critical time when the state would need these machines.” Brine stated that the project would not have succeeded without the support of Joe Schoenbeck of the Perduco Group, a subsidiary of LinQuest, who provided operations and logistics support; Air Force Col. Paul Murphy, military professor and senior service advisor at the Naval War College, who helped manage all of the volunteers; Dana Lesperance, director of Absolute Respiratory Care, who came to URI every day to make sure the team had the components it needed and to help us decide which machines were useful; Jim Owens, principal of Nautilus Defense, who built the ozone sanitation unit in a room at the Union; Chrys Shea, owner and founder of Shea Engineering Services,

A volunteer inspecting the donated CPAP and BiPAP devices.

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