 OIST is helping with the fight against COVID-19 by applying our expertise to solve practical problems for the community. My name is Keshav Dhani and I lead the FEMTO second spectroscopy unit at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology at Graduate University. We are a group of physicists that mainly use lasers to study materials. There is a severe shortage of personal protective equipment for our medical workers, the medical workers who are putting their lives on the line to protect the rest of the Okinawan community. In particular, they're facing a shortage of N95 masks. The problem of the shortage can potentially be addressed by reusing the masks rather than throwing them out after one-time use. But if you're going to reuse the masks, you need to sterilize them. An easy way to do this is with UVC light, which deactivates viruses and bacteria and allows masks to be safely used again. With this principle in mind, a dedicated team designed and built several models of sterilization unit with the aim of providing them to local hospitals. This is made of aluminum and also four UVC bulk in two lamps, but it is collimated along horizontal directions so when we are hanging masks this way, then this whole of that mask is exposed from both sides. This is very simple. So here we have here magnetic hooks and we can align if we have different shape of size of mask then also you can shift easily. Each unit can essentially sterilize a mask on the order of three to five minutes and so they can roughly do a few hundred masks a day. So it is very easy to use and then so we did experiment for 30 trials and within 30 trials we did not see any sign of degradation of N95 masks. With 10 units produced, OIST is helping frontline healthcare workers stay safe so they can save lives.