Prof. Lisa Alvarez-Cohen will be the lecturer for CEE’s 2022 Richart/Woods Distinguished Lecture on Monday, October 3. The event will be held in the LEC Johnson Rooms from 3:30 to 4:30 p.m., followed by a reception in Masco Commons.

Prof. Alvarez-Cohen is the Vice Provost for Academic Planning and the Fred and Claire Sauer Professor of Environmental Engineering, UC Berkeley. Faculty and Postdocs should remind students they are welcomed to attend the lecture and reception.

Biology of emerging contaminants - do they really eventually emerge?

ABSTRACT
Societal demand for new products promotes the production and release of new chemicals. Additionally, population growth and climate change has produced increased demand on water resources, resulting in greater reliance on direct and indirect water reuse. Advances in analytical chemistry enables us to detect environmental contaminants with increasing sensitivity, allowing us to discover new families of emerging contaminants that threaten our water resources. Understanding the biotransformation potential of emerging contaminants has been a challenge that’s been greatly assisted recently by means of molecular tools. This talk will describe lessons-learned and research aimed at discovering the biodegradation potential and pathways for a variety of important “emerging contaminants," including MTBE, I,4-dioxane, NDMA, PBDEs and aqueous film forming foams (AFFF).

SPEAKER BIO
Lisa Alvarez-Cohen is the Vice Provost for Academic Planning, the Fred and Claire Sauer Professor of Environmental Engineering, and the past-Chair of the Faculty Senate at UC Berkeley. She received her Bachelor’s Degree in Engineering and Applied Science from Harvard University and her M.S. and Ph.D. in Environmental Engineering and Science from Stanford University.

Her research areas include biotransformation and fate of environmental water contaminants, environmental microbiology and ecology, bioremediation, biological wastewater nutrient removal, and application of molecular and isotopic techniques for studying environmental microbial communities. She has coauthored the textbook Environmental Engineering Science. She is a fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology and a member of the National Academy of Engineering. She has won a number of awards including the China 1,000 Talents National Award, the ASCE Simon W. Freese Environmental Engineering Award, the W.M. Keck Foundation Award for Engineering Teaching Excellence, and the National Science Foundation Young Investigator Award.