As we start the week, I wanted to pause for a moment to express a sincere thank you to the hundreds of critical employees who have been working tirelessly and constantly since the start of Memorial’s COVID-19 response.

The work you do may not always be visible or obvious to your colleagues or the broader community, but your role has been vital to Memorial’s operations and keeping each other safe in this time of transition to remote learning and working.

Our faculty across campuses and disciplines embraced new ways of teaching and thinking and supporting their students in the monumental shift to remote learning within an impossibly short timeline.

The Centre for Innovation in Teaching and Learning and their counterparts at Grenfell and Marine Institute, along with the Office of the Chief Information Officer and technology teams, are keeping our critical systems running after a marathon to move us to remote delivery.

Our custodial, campus enforcement, facilities management and health and safety teams across our campuses are keeping our buildings clean, safe and operational for those who must come to campus.

Student support services across our campuses, including counselling and wellness teams, our registrars’ offices, academic advisors, faculty members and academic leaders are all supporting our students to successfully complete the current semester and working on plans for spring 2020.

Our residences staff, Facilities Management and vendors are taking care of the students who remain on campus, keeping them safe, fed, healthy and supported. Together with our Internationalization Office, they are also working to make sure our international students are supported and assisted with the unique challenges they face.

Our animal care team, technical services, research tech support staff and grant facilitators are making sure vital research and equipment is preserved and researchers are supported.

Teams are also supporting our broader community through COVID-19-related research and development and other activities in support of our health-care system.

Behind the scenes, administrative staff across functions like finance, HR, procurement, risk and MarComm are working to shift our operations to a new normal and share information that our community needs to know at this time.

Last, but in no way least, I want to thank the members of the Emergency Operations Centre group and its many committees, for taking on new and demanding roles at this unprecedented time.

To each of you – in all areas, not just those noted here – thank you from me. Thank you from the senior leadership team. Thank you from the entire Memorial community.

Together we will weather this storm.