EP 101 | Dr. Peter Tsai N95 Mask Inventor Helps to Fight Covid-19

Nov 2, 2020

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A note from Talking Taiwan host Felicia Lin:

In part two of my interview part two with Dr. Peter Tsai, he talks about how he was called out of retirement to help address the shortage and demand for N95 masks with the onset of the Coronavirus pandemic. Dr. Tsai is the Taiwanese American inventor of the N95 mask technology who has come out of retirement to figure out how to sterilize N95s for reuse, and to help scale up production of the masks.

Special Thanks to HoChie Tsai of TaiwneseAmercan.org for making this interview possible.

Here’s a little preview of what we talked about in this podcast episode:

How Dr. Tsai was contacted and came out of retirement because of the demand and shortage of N95 masks
How he tested whether or not N95 masks could be sterilized
The shelf life of N95 masks
The experiments that Dr. Tsai conducted to determine how to sterilize N95 masks so that they could be reused
COVID-19 can survive for 28 days on smooth surfaces
If N95 masks get wet, submerged in water, or come into high humidity it won’t have charge decay, however if washed with soap and water N-95 masks will lose their effectiveness
The stories of how people found Dr. Tsai
How Dr. Tsai has worked harder than he did before retiring
Dr. Tsai’s relationship with Oak Ridge Labs, and how he was able to help them scale up their production of N95 masks
Why there’s been a shortage of N95 masks
How he’s been nicknamed the “screwdriver professor”
Research-oriented vs. industry-oriented science
Why Dr. Tsai decided to come out of retirement to work on N95 technology and what’s next