BALTIMORE, Md. – Every day Jill Andrews of Jill Andrews Gowns works with fine silk, chiffon, and French lace.
"I've been designing wedding gowns for about 20 years," Andrews said.
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She loves helping brides look their best, but recently the veteran fashion designer put her skills to new use.
"Now I'm working with Tyvek and Velcro and plastic," Andrews added.
She volunteered to be part of a team at Johns Hopkins University, building a better suit to protect healthcare workers from Ebola.
"I have two very close friends that are from Liberia, that have um that have sisters that are actually living in Liberia so I had a direct, personal connection," Andrews explained.
Students at Hopkins' Center for Bioengineering Innovation and Design studied current protective gear. The goal is to keep the suit from touching a worker's skin as he removes the gear. Engineers would brainstorm and Jill Andrews would create.
Melody Tan, a biomedical engineering student at Johns Hopkins University said, "We're working on the hood design and so we could sketch these out and she could kind of put something together, and say is this what you mean?"
For some, there's a huge gap between fashion and function, but Andrews sees the similarities between both.
"It's the most important garment that a person's ever going to buy, and that's really important to me. If this helps save one life, if this makes one person's job or day a little bit easier, um that's exactly why I'm doing it," Andrews said.
The Ebola suit prototype designed by the Johns Hopkins team is one of five projects selected in December to receive federal funding through the US Agency for International Development. The exact amount of the funding has not been released, yet.
In addition to doing a better job of keeping health care workers from coming in contact with contaminants, the suit is expected to keep the wearer cooler, a huge benefit in humid regions like West Africa.