Southern West Virginia Community and Technical College 3-D Printing Face Masks for PPE effort

Mount Gay, W.Va. – Southern West Virginia Community and Technical College’s Information Technology faculty are 3-D printing face masks to help with the shortage of PPE for healthcare workers. The effort is in conjunction with the West Virginia National Guard’s ongoing work to supply masks.

“We are doing all we can to help in this effort, and to help fight this pandemic,” Rick Thompson, Professor of Information Technology at Southern, said. “We are just now ramping up our production and hope to supply as many of these masks as we can, given that we’re a smaller college.”

Southern’s two 3-D printers are working around the clock to produce masks based on a prototype provided by the West Virginia National Guard, with five more printers coming online soon.

For more information on Southern’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic, please visit our website at https://www.southernwv.edu/coronavirus/