“One thing they mentioned right at the very beginning is the N95 respirator mask, because that is a crucial, essential piece of PPE,” Nguyen said. “They already told us that the price has been really high, it’s hard to get, they have to recycle instead. They don’t know how to do it safely.”

So Nguyen and Vishal Verma, an assistant professor in the same department, got to work examining various technologies and chemicals. But it wasn’t long before another question emerged: What about people who can’t access lab-grade materials and machinery?

The pair didn’t have to go farther than their kitchens to find an answer.

“It just happened that both Vishal and myself and a number of our students are Asian, and we cook rice every night,” Nguyen said. “We said like, ‘Oh, maybe some type of electric cooker might work.’ ”

She swiftly dispatched one of her students to Walmart with specific instructions. “Look for something at Walmart anyone can buy,” she said. “Something easy. They just hit the button.”

The student came back with a Farberware multifunction pressure cooker that cost about $50.

In a recently published study, Nguyen and Verma detailed how the dry heat produced by such electric cookers (rice cookers or multicookers such as Instant Pots) may be an effective way of decontaminating medical-grade N95 masks. Using the rice preset on the Farberware cooker and N95 respirators from 3M, a major manufacturer of the protective coverings, the researchers found that 50-minute treatments without pressure at a temperature of 212 degrees Fahrenheit left the masks thoroughly cleaned without compromising fit or filtration efficiency.

“The N95 can be reused using a very simple method,” said Nguyen, whose research focuses on pathogen transmission and control. “We are not testing exhaustively every device out there, everything, but we want to show that this concept works. Then people can use the idea and apply to other things.”

The study – published in Environmental Science & Technology Letters, a peer-reviewed journal – joins a growing body of research that has emerged during the pandemic that evaluates the efficacy of kitchen appliances as a sanitation tool. In February, a team from Chung Shan Medical University in Taiwan found that dry-steaming surgical masks in a rice cooker for several minutes had a sterilizing effect, the Taipei Times reported.