Collegiality, compromise and teamwork help Duke-NUS researchers reach warp speed.
“Those of us who worked on COVID-19—at one point, we were the only ones in the building,” recalls Professor Ooi Eng Eong about that period of time where everyone apart from the most essential workers remained at home.
Duke-NUS is, at most times, abuzz with activity. A sample week, for example, might see a PhD candidate defending their thesis about how machine learning systems are valuable for emergency care; researchers gathering for a seminar about the life cycle of immune cells; students, faculty and clinicians streaming into learning spaces; and research teams hard at work in their respective labs.
But as Ooi notes, the Circuit Breaker — which began on 7 April and concluded on 1 June 2020 — changed all that. The nationwide measures, enacted to stop the transmission of COVID-19 in densely-populated Singapore, meant a paradigm shift for school and workplace activities.
Working from home, as well as home-based learning through videoconferences and other online platforms, became the default. Any essential work had to be carried out in compliance with safe distancing measures.
RESEARCH STAFF WERE SPLIT INTO AM/PM SHIFTS, DENOTED BY THE GREY AND WHITE LANYARDS, WHILE ADMIN STAFF FOLLOWED AN ALTERNATE WEEK BUSINESS CONTINUITY PLAN OF BLUE AND ORANGE WEEKS. THE SCHOOL FOLLOWED THIS ARRANGEMENT BEFORE THE CIRCUIT BREAKER AND AGAIN AFTER THE MEASURES WERE EASED
Working hours were staggered. Group events postponed indefinitely. And shift work and splits teams became commonplace—so that only part of the team would need quarantining should someone fall ill.
How did Duke-NUS adapt to it all?
A new way of working
By looking out for each other, for one.
“For the first, five months or six months because of COVID, I’m setting up the lab, and it was a royal pain,” remembers Assistant Professor Ooi Yaw Shin about how it all began for the host-virus interaction lab that he leads. “We could not receive the equipment. We couldn’t…”
He trails off.
“My ex-lab from Stanford, they wanted to ship me some reagents, so that I could start working in the lab,” he continues about the broken international supply chain. “But then we had the Circuit Breaker here. And over there, they had an order for residents to shelter in place.” Such orders are typically used during moments of danger in the United States, mostly to protect people from natural disasters such as hurricanes, and require people to remain indoors until they are given the all clear.
“So, SFO [San Francisco International Airport] was shut down and it was a mess,” says Ooi Yaw Shin. Everything was significantly delayed.”
He brightens up.
“Luckily, Eng Eong and [Wang] Linfa — Gavin [Smith] as well — they shared their resources with me. I could kickstart some basic stuff.”
And it was not just gear that was readily shared among the scientists.
“Whatever we were learning, we were telling each other,” Ooi Eng Eong remembers of those times overall. “I still pop into Antonio [Bertoletti’s] room every time I want to talk to him about T cells. And he’ll come knocking on my door.
“It’s good for science. That’s how we should work. Like this.”
Embracing new — and old — ways of doing things
And for other researchers, the Circuit Breaker meant adapting to new work conditions in order to produce the same results.
Ms Kirsty Freeman, the then-lead for the Clinical Performance Centre, had to re-organise classes and the Objective Structured Clinical Examinations (OSCEs) for final-year medical students — these students needed to graduate, one way or another.
So, Freeman shifted to videoconferencing to deliver some of her medical simulation sessions. And for the exams, she and her team tactically mounted iPads, mobile phones and laptops with webcams in each examination room so that everyone who participated in the exams could do so safely. Here, “duct tape, a selfie stick, two tripods, three IV poles, plastic sheet protectors and countless cable ties” were invaluable.
“I felt like MacGyver,” sums up Ms Freeman.
Meanwhile, Professor Eric Finkelstein, who directs the Lien Centre for Palliative Care at Duke-NUS, and his team quickly pivoted to conduct interviews for their health economics project remotely.
A transition to phone interviews, though, meant that the team had to re-centre their interview techniques around the nuances of voice-only responses.
“It’s not as good. You can’t read body language or faces,” explains Finkelstein. “We survey a lot of patients. We look for signs of fatigue, we look for signs of distress.”
“When you’re on the phone, you just don’t have that same ability,” he continues. “But the team adapted and did the best they could.”
As for Finkelstein himself, he missed going to the office.
“Sitting at home… yeah, I didn’t like it and I don’t like it,” he admits. “I prefer to be in the office, I like the team in the office. But in terms of productivity, I would say we had only a very small reduction in productivity.”
Holding on together for a better tomorrow
All this is not to say that working through the Circuit Breaker was an easy task. It wasn’t.
“Those colleagues with children had to come to work. But their kids were at home doing home-based learning — how did they?” wonders Ms Kamini Kunasegeran, a research assistant from Bertoletti’s lab at Duke-NUS.
“It was a nightmare,” adds her labmate, Ms Adeline Chia, a senior research associate. ‘And researchers were also anxious to know if they could come into the lab or not.”
“Yeah, it was tough to decide who got to come in,” notes Kamini about planning lab shifts and rotas. “But that was not because no one wanted to come in. We all wanted to do our bit.”
The circuit-breaker measures, too, meant putting projects on hold, and for Associate Professor Ashley St John, this required reaching out to support her Duke-NUS colleagues.
“We all had to make compromises,” says St John. With her family in the United States, she often had to pick whether to be with them or with her lab as flights, quarantines and re-entry permits made regular travel impossible.
“We just kept an eye on each other, making sure that everyone was coping with those compromises,” she says. “We were all stretched pretty thin when it came to COVID-19.”
Professor Ian Curran, Vice-Dean for Education at Duke-NUS, echoes this need to keep pushing through trying times.
“You just kept swimming. Kept going. Tomorrow would be better,” he says. “Tomorrow will be better.”