Necessity is the mother of invention, and creative thinkers are the innovators.
In March 2020, shortly after the pandemic hit crisis levels in Quebec, the Montreal General Hospital Foundation and the Research Institute of the McGill University Health Centre (RI-MUHC), in partnership with the Faculty of Engineering, launched the Code Life Ventilator Challenge, an international competition seeking to inspire an innovative design for a ventilator that was simple, inexpensive, and easy to build, maintain and transport. The $200,000 prize was temptation enough, but the stakes were high: entrants had only two weeks to realize their vision.
Simon Tartakovsky, a third-year undergraduate studying physics, jumped at the opportunity to create something that could save lives. He started and co-led Team Breeze, a group comprised of students from various McGill faculties and even some American universities, as well as a couple of graduates.
“We basically built the ventilator in our collective basements using tools we had at home,” says Tartakovsky, who led the hardware design of the ventilator and was responsible for its construction. “We were also given access to the Physics department’s 3D printers.” The students put hundreds of hours into their creation, all while undertaking their full academic schedules and preparing for final exams.
Of the more than 1,000 teams that entered the competition, Team Breeze was recognized in May as one of only nine semi-finalists. “Although we didn’t make the finals, we are taking it as a learning experience,” says Tartakovsky. “We are grateful to have had the experience to share our prototype with the judges and receive valuable feedback.”
Team Breeze decided not to continue its ventilator project, as Tartakovsky and the team realized as time went on that a ventilator shortage was not going to be a deciding factor in the pandemic. Still, several of his peers are working on a new project developing a portable, low-cost ultrasonic brain scanner for use by first responders and in field medicine.
The Code Life Ventilator Challenge was not the first health-related project in which Tartakovsky was involved. In 2019, he was part of McGill Neurotech, a group of students who created a brain-controlled wheelchair. “While I love physics, I'm passionate about discovering and creating things that can eventually be useful to people,” says Tartakovsky. “Healthcare combines my interest in and knowledge of the more technical aspects, with an application that can be useful to the world, especially during the pandemic.”
Tartakovsky’s passion for discovery and innovation started early. His dad, an environmental engineer, would rarely give him direct answers to his questions about the universe. Instead, he encouraged inductive reasoning, guiding his son toward the answer by doling out relevant bits of knowledge. Years later, Tartakovsky would have an astrophysics professor at CEGEP who embraced the same teaching method, allowing him to understand fundamental ideas about the universe by changing the way he approached challenging questions.
As Tartakovsky prepares to start a doctoral program in Physics, he reflects on how physics has given meaning to his own personal quest for truth. “Physics gives me a deeper understanding of the universe, not by learning more facts but by learning new ways to think about the things I already know.”
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