I came actually in July, 2020.

So height of the pandemic, got here and, you know, we spent a lot of time talking about what are we going to do?

How are we prepared?

There had been, and my predecessor, Phil Dubois was here and then he retired.

They had started the preparations, but as you know, everybody went home.

And for us, the question was, okay, what are we going to do and how might we be able to begin to have people come back to campus?

I feel really fortunate in 2021, we had a group of faculty members in our bioinformatics department who said, we can actually go into the wastewater that's in the residence halls.

So if people use the bathrooms, we can go down to the basement and check the wastewater and determine if there are elements of the COVID virus in the waste that's coming out.

And then we can test individuals in whatever residence hall.

And they started doing that in our residence halls.

So if you remember in 2021, every campus started to bring students back to campus and then Chapel Hill and then State.

And then I think ECU had to send students home again because there were outbreaks.

We actually mitigated the issue of outbreaks by doing the wastewater testing.

And so we were able to find out before anybody had symptoms or signs, if you actually tested positive and we isolated those students so that we didn't have to send people home again.