Happy Hispanic Heritage Month! At NIH, Hispanics and Latinos have been at the forefront of some of the most important moments in recent history, including COVID-19. Our Behind the Mask project, which collected COVID-19 stories from the NIH community, has received personal reflections from Hispanic and Latino employees during the pandemic. Included was this submission from Omar Echegoyen, a recruitment specialist at the Clinical Center who connects patients with clinical studies. Studies with more diverse participants tend to have more accurate results because they better reflect the actual makeup of the US population, so Echegoyen made flyers and posters like this one, in both English and Spanish, to recruit Hispanic and Latino participants. The pandemic was a difficult time, but Echegoyen said “Esto va abrir nuevas puertas de oportunidades a ser mas creatives y como trabajas en unidad en momentos de crisis.” ("This will open new doors of opportunity to be more creative and show how you work in unity in moments of crisis.”)
To learn more about the Behind the Mask project, look for the banner right above this post.
Have you looked at our oral histories lately? New interviews with scientists, nurses, and administrators are being conducted and posted every month.
One of our newest oral histories is with Dr. Dominic Esposito, director of the Protein Expression Laboratory at NCI. Have you ever wondered how researchers get the raw materials to conduct experiments? In March 2020, Dr. Esposito was approached by NIH researchers who needed a constant supply of COVID-19 spike proteins to study how the virus works and build a vaccine.
“Figuring out how to run a group and to carry out this kind of research from home was a challenge, especially in the early days of the pandemic, when time was a factor and everybody was putting in 16-hour days. It was very difficult for me to be that far away and not…stand there in the lab and look at the data. That was a challenge, but frankly, it turned out to be a great opportunity. It made our group more efficient; we learned a lot of new technologies out of this.”
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Cell culture technician Kelly Snead separates final SARS-CoV-2 proteins into storage tubes for shipment to NIH researchers. Recruitment poster made by Omar Echegoyen during the COVID-19 pandemic, submitted to Behind the Mask.
