TAIPEI (Taiwan News) — The American Institute in Taiwan (AIT) on Sunday (Sept. 8) shared a U.S. State Department article over their Facebook account talking about Taiwanese scientist Peter Tsai (蔡秉燚), who studied in the U.S. and invented the N95 mask.

Tsai went to the U.S. in 1981 to study at Kansas State University (KSU), where he went on to earn a doctorate in material science after amassing over 500 credits in a wide variety of subjects, such as engineering and the hard sciences, according to Share America.

"[That] is equivalent to six Ph.D.s," said Tsai.

He then followed his professor from KSU to the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, where he also became a professor.

Tsai led a team of researchers in 1992 to develop a material with electrostatically charged fibers that filtered air by attracting particles like dust, bacteria, and viruses and trapping 95 percent of them before they could pass through the mask, Share America reported. That in turn led to the creation of the N95 mask, which was originally made for construction workers in dusty environments.

According to Tsai, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control in 1996 found out that the N95 mask could also attract and block viruses. The mask used by medical professionals around the world was created by combining Tsai’s material and 3M’s medical-mask design.

The Taiwanese professor retired in 2018, but after the coronavirus pandemic broke out, he came out of retirement, working 18- to 20-hour days to figure out the best way to sanitize N95 masks for reuse. Tsai discovered that baking masks in the oven at 71 degrees Celsius was effective.

Another method is to leave a used N95 mask out for seven days without touching it so the virus dies naturally. If the virus does not come in contact with a host during that time, it dies on the surface of the mask.