Speaker: Prof. Saikat Basu, Ph.D. of South Dakota State University
Moderation: Theresa Zettl
The ongoing Covid-19 pandemic has hit us hard in our personal lives: Wearing masks, restrictions in socializing, cancelled events, working from home office, lockdowns. With more than 260 million infections and more than 5 million deaths worldwide, we also need to look into ways of preventing or mitigating future pandemics. Will there be a new normal after the Covid-19 pandemic, will we be able to get our pre-Covid-19 lives back? Are masks and vaccines really a game changer in the pandemic? And how should we deal with people who neglect all responsibility to protect us all?Prof. Saikat Basu is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Mechanical Engineering at South Dakota State University. His scholarly background is in theoretical and computational fluid mechanics. Basu received his Ph.D. in Engineering Mechanics from the Department of Biomedical Engineering and Mechanics at Virginia Tech, in 2014. Following that, he had two postdoctoral stints: at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology in Japan, followed by the second one at the Department of Otolaryngology/Head and Neck Surgery at UNC Chapel Hill School of Medicine. Basu’s research program at South Dakota State University is supported by a mix of US National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health grants.You will find more information about Saikat Basu here: https://sites.google.com/vt.edu/basu-research-group/home
Programme of the webinar:
– Short introduction by moderator Theresa Zettl
– Prof. Dr. Saikat Basu’s presentation
– Question & Answers
Feedback from the participants:
- “Prof Basu is clearly an expert and it was so interesting to listen to him. The application of fluid dynamics to infection control was fascinating.”
- “I like the factual and scientific angle of the presentation to help humanity cope with future pandemics. well done! I like the different recommendations that were proposed by the professor as an extra layer of defense that could help keep societies open despite the pandemic and the prescriptive mechanism that could help governments make better decisions or measure the societal and public health ramifications of each measure in advance.”
- “I liked it the most a part about bio-inspired filter design.”
- “Information provided both on scientific and well explained communication.”
- “Thank you for this very interesting webinar it was also very educational. The information about those masks and those nose sprays is also very well, in fact, we all learned a lot of it”
- “I had the mixed feeling of both fantastic and almost too good to be true – especially that nasal spray improvement.”