The earliest known life forms on Earth are thought to be microbes and fast-forward 3.7 billion years later these organisms still inhabit the Earth alongside us. Microbes have evolved to survive through any and all conditions: freezing and blazing environments? Yes; pH of battery acid? Also yes; Radioactive waste sites? Definitely, they are there.

Today, as overwhelming anthropogenic pollution threatens our way of life, we should take a closer look and appreciate these microbes’ long-lived tenacity. This is exactly what the Olivares Lab at UC Irvine is doing; Professor Chris Olivares and his team specialize in observing, understanding, and engineering microbial solutions to pollution. You can learn more about their four current projects under their website at “Olivares Lab- UCI Civil and Environmental Engineering”

One prominent class of contaminants is perfluoroalkyl or poly-fluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) that can be found in fire-fighting foams, microwavable popcorn packaging, or even that cookie wrapper you ate earlier, making their way to surface and ground waters and eventually, even the water we drink. PFAS are a class of highly fluorinated synthetic materials that range in chemical makeup for a wide range of intended uses, which makes them a difficult environmental hazard to tackle because of their sheer number and their complexity. 

But human-made pollution isn’t all there is. The contamination we face is made even worse by climate change disasters, which the lab also studies. In May 2022, for example, the coastal fire near Laguna Hills burned around 20 homes, but also deposited burned residue and runoff nto Aliso Creek and, eventually, the beach.

With the first precipitation that fall, just a few inches of rain flushed many chemicals into the water, including polyaromatic hydrocarbons and other products from burned plastic. Among the pollutant-filled water were also microorganisms that could eat the pollutants away.  With these findings, Olivares and his team hope to develop treatment methods that can clean up the environment at even a microscopic level.

“Field-based monitoring data helps us understand the chemistry of pollutants during an oil spill or even ordinary daily sources like airports, which use a lot of jet fuel that may lead to fuel-based fires and then in turn require fire-fighting foams,” he stated.

With this, they hope to support large scale post-disaster efforts by finding a long term solution to environmental pollution. These efforts are complemented by environmental data science tools to understand pollution and design better experiments.

“If we want to minimize pollution, why not look to the best natural chemists: microbes? If you can harness what makes them happy, they are a very versatile tool in environmental cleanups.” Olivares said.

Why U.C. yourself at UCI?

Professor Olivares earned his PhD from the University of Arizona in environmental engineering. There, he specialized in environmental biotechnology, remediation, metabolomics, pollutant fate in natural and engineering systems, microbial toxicity, and environmental organic chemistry. He then did a postdoc on wildfire impacts to water at Clemson University and another one on combined chemical and biological transformations of PFAS at UC Berkeley. In 2021, he joined UCI faculty at the height of virtual learning and despite the unprecedented challenges, frantic fear of the future, and social distancing, he was still able to find and connect with like-minded researchers. 

“There was a good feeling of collaboration, both within and between departments which made research a little easier,” he said. “It was refreshing to see that UCI encourages interaction between earth system science, ecology and evolutionary biology, civil engineering, even art history, and so many other fields of study you wouldn’t normally see working together”

Olivares is an extremely caring individual, seeking to include diversity in all facets of identity in his lab: race, gender identity, sexual orientation, and all others. With this open mindset, teamwork really makes the dream work for Olivares’ lab. When asked about his current crowning achievement in research, Olivares found that some of his proudest moments were at the American Chemical Society where he watched his first PhD students give their own conference talks.

“I got to sit in the front and watch them answer questions about research that they were really passionate about,” Olivares said fondly, “It was very rewarding, having only recently been a PhD student myself and getting to see people that I mentored succeed in something that really mattered to them.”

Professor Olivares values a strong sense of community not only inside the lab, but also in the real world. To him, the point of exploratory studies is not just to keep the useful bits within research facilities but turn greater knowledge into public knowledge, especially for marginalized communities. Because of this, the Olivares lab has found many community partners at UCI that also share this drive to educate and improve the real world beyond lab research.

“UCI is good at identifying community partners,” Olivares said, before listing just a few efforts he worked with recently: SiriPods, a summer program for UCI undergraduates to learn research skills; UCI Science Project and the Compton Residency Program where we hosted highschool students to perform experiments on bioremediation and stormwater treatment; the UC-CSU K-12 Climate Change Literacy Projects to connect K-12 teachers with researchers at UCI.