Helen Brunet was our valued colleague and collaborator. We met because of her interest in protecting people from COVID using comfortable, effective, and well-designed masks. In her role as Vestechpro’s strategic directions director, she had already helped multiple companies with advice about design and materials for masks, catalyzing the manufacture of masks for wear in the community in Quebec.

We appreciated everything she had learned from these activities and the depth of her knowledge about fabric, optimizing design, and communication strategies. She was the perfect person for her role at Vestechpro and the perfect person to join our Cloth Mask Knowledge Exchange working group. Her voice was always important in this group, which has advised scientists at McMaster and Windsor Universities in their mask-related research for more than two years, and through the production of two published peer-reviewed articles and three more in preparation. She also informed scientific communication around this research, which included articles in The Conversation which have been read 1,200,000 times in English and 470,000 times in French. We were so happy to hear from her colleagues at Vestechpro that she loved and valued working as part of this group in the same way that we loved and valued her work.

She was an inspiration to us and our students; a role model for how to place one’s skills and interests at the service of one’s community. She was calm and kind, persistent and thoughtful. She was always ready to help, generous with her time and her resources. She was an educator at heart and passionate about knowledge transfer particularly for francophone communities. She brought a unique cultural perspective to our group and was instrumental in helping us reach a wider audience in Québec and throughout French Canada and even worldwide. We will miss her greatly.

We were happy to read that she lived surrounded by love and by people who appreciated and valued her, as we did. We are thinking about her family, her colleagues, and all those who loved her as they mourn her loss. She will be remembered.

Darren Lawless & Catherine Clase

Co-chairs, on behalf of the Cloth Mask Knowledge Exchange, a stakeholder group formed in 2020 to connect scientists and people with mask-making expertise.